■NRY TAMES 



JO OK... 



^nirl AN INTRODUCTION BY 



il4>.^.t^^ 



^zt#^^. 




Copyright Ij^ 



€OPYRIGHT DEPOSnV 



THE 

HENRY JAMES 

YEAR BOOK 



THE 

HENRY JAMES 
YEAR BOOK 



SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY 

EVELYN GARNAUT SMALLEY 

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
HENRY JAMES AND WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS 




RICHARD G. BADGER 

THE GORHAM PRESS 
BOSTON 



Copyright 1911 by Richard G, Badger 



All Rights Reserved 



^^^ 



I ack;no\vledg!;c, with many thanks, the courtesy of 

Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons, 

Messrs. Harper & Brothers, 

The Houghton Mifflin Company, 

The Macmillan Company and 

Duffield «^ Company 
in giving me their permission for the use of quotations 
from the writings of Mr. Henry James published by them 
and of which they have the copyright. 

Evelyn Garnaut Smalley 



^ 



^ / 



The gorham Press, Bosion, U. s. a 



©CU297:>18 



PREFACE 



I hope it will be apparent that my work on this book 
has been a happiness to me. I have also been happy in 
the thought that it may bring pleasure to some of the 
many who share in the privilege of companionship with 
Mr. Henry James' books, and who will understand that 
the task has been not so much what to select, as what to 
regretfully omit, and it has been my hope that it may lead 
some who have missed the precious opportunity of grow- 
ing up with the books to turn to them. I should then feel 
I had done the little I actively could in acknowledgement 
of a life-long obligation ; a debt which I am glad to think 
is constantly increasing. I cannot adequately express my 
gratitude to Mr. Henry James for the generous sympathy 
and the appreciation (given to me by him) of my share 
in the book, and for the gracious kindness that has done 
so much toward the furtherance of the accomplishment 
of my purpose. I can only feel both proud and humble 
and give him once more my deepest thanks. 



Evelyn Garnaut Smalley. 



INTRODUCTION 



The Author to the Public 

The Athenaeum, 
Pall Mall, S. W. 

London, June i6, 19 lo. 

I greatly desire to express to all who shall be 
interested my earnest approval of Miss Eve- 
lyn Smalley's Henry James Year Book, of 
which I have seen considerable portions and 
which she has put together with my full assent 
and sympathy. To the use she has made of 
passages from my writings, I greatly and un- 
reservedly subscribe and shall be very happy 
and must congratulate myself if the present at- 
testation of this fortunately contributes to the 
publication of the book, and thus to the recog- 
nition and reward of so much friendly and dis- 
criminating and in every way gracious labour. 
I take the thing for a very charming and illum- 
inating tribute to the literary performance of 

Henry James 



INTRODUCTION 



II 

One of the Public to the Author 

My dear James : 

You could hardly have expected a response 
to your approval for this happily Imagined se- 
lection before the appeal had reached any of 
your pubHc In print; but I, who have been priv- 
ileged to see It In manuscript together with the 
proofs of the book, make bold to forecast the 
general satisfaction which I know awaits It. 

After being so many years ago your eager 
editor, and ever since your applausive critic, 
I ought not to feel bound to insist now upon my 
delight In the charms of your manner, the depth 
of your thought, the beauty of your art, which 
the grouping of these passages freshly wit- 
nesses even to such a veteran lover of your 
work as I; and In fact I do not feel so bound. 
I do not so much fulfill a duty as Indulge a 
pleasure In owning my surprise at the con- 
stant succession of your felicities here. In 
the relief which their detachment from the 
context gives them, they have not merely nov- 



INTRODUCTION 



elty; they seem to have added to their In- 
trinsic value. I have kept asking myself, How 
came he to think of this or that? How came he 
to say It In such form that the words as well 
as the phrases appear of his Invention? The 
delicate wit, the urbane humor, the quiet wis- 
dom, the unfailing good temper — I am sure 
that the readers who have already affirmed 
their taste by liking these in your novels and 
essays will like them the more in an ordering 
which would be fatal to Inferior performance. 

That this volume should send people to your 
books who do not yet know them, as it will 
surely send people back to them who have long 
known them, Is something greatly to be wished 
In the Interest of literature, and especially of 
American Hterature. We do not so abound 
in masterpieces that we can afford to ignore or 
neglect the finest of the few we have. 
Yours ever, 

W. D. HOWELLS 



JANUARY 



THE air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle 
like a crystal, the faintest gradations of tone 
were perceptible in the sky, the west be- 
came deep and delicate, everything grew 
doubly distinct before taking on the dim- 
ness of evening. There were pink flushes 
on snow, 'tender' reflections on patches of stiffened marsh, 
sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery, 
on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky undu- 
lations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects 
used to light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive 
often sat at the window with her companion before it was 
time for the lamp. They admired the sunsets, they re- 
joiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the parlor-wall, 
they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful ex- 
cursions. They watched the stellar points come out at 
last in a colder heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm 
in arm, they turned away with a sense that the winter 
night was even more cruel than the tyranny of men — 
turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a 
glittering tea-tray and more and more talk. 

The Bostonians, 1886. 



JANUARY I. Ivan Turgenieff (French Poets and 

Novelists), 1878. 

His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its 
larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On 
this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insol- 
ent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness 
very apt to be vv^eak; folly very apt to be defiant; wick- 
edness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, 
people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. 
But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, 
no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for 
ever and ever ; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dis- 
pense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and 
give it what it demands, in exchange for something which 
is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes 
to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is 
mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mix- 
ture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will 
and seek to understand. 

JANUARY 2. The Next Time, 1895. 

When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home 
with heliotrope. 



JANUARY 3. The Golden Bowl 1904, 

"You Americans are almost incredibly romantic." 

"Of course we are. That's just what makes everything 

so nice for us." 

"Everything?" 

"Well, everything that's nice at all — the world, the 

beautiful world, or everything in it that is beautiful. I 

mean we see so much." 



JANUARY 4' The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 

"Judge everyone and everything for yourself." 
"That's what I try to do," said Isabel, "but when you do 
that people call you conceited." 

"You're not to mind them — that's precisely my argu- 
ment; not to mind what they say about yourself any 
more than what they say about your friend or your ene- 
my." 

— "I think you're right; but there are some things I 
can't help minding; for instance, when my friend is 
attacked, or when I myself am praised." 



JANUARY 5. The Marriages, 1892. 

She was as undomestic as a shop-front and as out of tunc 
as a parrot. 



JANUARY 6. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

I've often thought success comes to her b)' the spirit in 
her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right 
one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of 
everything, become the right one. 



JANUARY 7. The Bundle of Letters, 1879. 

I do love their way of speaking, and sometimes I feel al- 
most as if it would be right to give up trying to learn 
French, and just try to learn to speak our own tongue 
as these English speak it. It isn't the things they say 
so much, though these are often rather curious; but it is 
in the way they pronounce, and in the sweetness of their 
voice. It seems as if they must t7'y a good deal to talk 
like that; but these English that are here don't seem to 
try at all, either to speak or do anything else. 



JANUARY 8. The Lesson of Balzac, 1905. 

The English writer wants to make sure, first of all, of 
your moral judgment; the French is willing, while it 
waits a little, to risk, for the sake of his subject and 
your interest, your spiritual salvation. 



JANUARY g. An International Episode, iS^g. 

"You must take us as we come — with all our Imperfec- 
tions on our heads. Of course we haven't your country 
life, and your old ruins, and your great estates, and your 
leisure-class and all that. But if we haven't, I should 
think you might find it a pleasant change — I think any 
country is pleasant where they have pleasant manners." 



JANUARY 10. The Given Case, 1900. 

**We must do our duty — when once we see it. I didn't 
know — I didn't understand. But now I do. It's when 
one's "eyes are opened that the wrong is wrong." 



JANUARY II. The Art of Fiction, 1884. 

But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the 
composition of the novel is, as I have already said, tljat It 
be sincere. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the 
first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be w^orthy 
of it. 



JANUARY 12. The Aspern Papers, 1888. 

It is not supposed to be the nature of women to rise as 
a general thing to the largest and most liberal 'view — I 
mean of a practical scheme ; but it has struck me that they 
sometimes throw off a bold conception — such as a man 
wouldn't have risen to — with singular serenity. 



JANUARY 13. The Reverberator, 1888, 

"Against Americans I have nothing to say; some of them 
are the best thing the world contains. That's precisely 
why one can choose." 



JANUARY 14. The Altar of the Dead, iSqS- 

She was always black-robed, as if she had had a succes- 
sion of sorrows. People were not poor, after all, whom so 
many losses would overtake; they were positively rich 
when they had so much to give up. 



JANUARY IS. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

"One was no doubt a meddlesome fool; one always is, to 
think one sees peoples' lives for them better than they see 
them for themselves. I always pay for it sooner or later, 
my sociable, my damnable, my unnecessary interest." 



JANUARY 16. The Portrait of a I.ady, 1881. 

"My dear young lady," said Mrs. Touchett, ''there are 
as mary points of view in the world as there are people 
of sense. You may say that doesn't make them very 
numerous! American? Never in the world; that's 
shockingly narrow. My point of view, thank God, is per- 
sonal !" 



JANUARY I7> The Awkward Age, 1899. 

"She does care for him you know," said Mr. Langdon. — 

Mitchy, at this, gave a long, wide, glare. 

"With Nanda," he next added, "it 's deep." 

His companion took it from him. "Deep." 

"And yet somehow it isn't abject." 

The old man wondered. "'Abject'?" 

"I mean it isn't pitiful. In its way," Mitchy developed, 

"it's happy." 

This, too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Langdon would 

take from him. "Yes — in its way." • 

"Any passion so great, so complete," Mitchy went on, is 

— satisfied or unsatisfied — a life." 



JANUARY 18. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more 
use than soap-bubbles, and she herself never dealt in 
such articles. One either did the thing or one didn't, 
and what one would quite differently have done belonged 
to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future 
life or of the origin of things. 



JANUARY IQ. Washington Square, i88l. 

*'She 's like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alter- 
nating with a dazzling brilliancy." 



JANUARY 20. What Maisie Knew, 1898. 

In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very 
air of a child's mind, the past, on each occasion, became for 
her as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to 
the actual wath a good faith that might have been touching 
to either parent. 



JANUARY 21. Pandora, 1883. 

"Haven't you discovered that the American girl expects 
something especially adapted to herself ? It's very well In 
Europe to have a few phrases that will do for any girl. 
The American girl isn't any girl; she's a remarkable indi- 
vidual in a remarkable genus." 



JANUARY 22. The Papers, 1903. 

She was only a suburban young woman in a sailor hat, 
and he a young man destitute in strictness of occasion 
for a "topper;" but they felt that they had in a peculiar 
way the freedom of the town, and the town, If It did 
nothing else, gave a range to the spirit. 



JANUARY 23. George Sand (French Poets and 

Novelists), 1878. 

People may like George Sand or not, but they can hardly 
deny that she is the great improvisatrice of literature — 
the writer who best answers to Shelley's description of the 
sky-lark singing '*in profuse strains of unpremeditated art." 
No writer has produced such great effects with an equal 
absence of premeditation. 



JANUARY 24. The Next Time, 1895. 



There was something a failure was, a failure in the mar- 
ket, that a success somehow wasn't. A success was as 
prosaic as a good dinner: there was nothing more to be 
said about it than that you had had it; and who but vul- 
gar people, in such a case, made gloating remarks about 
the courses? 



JANUARY 25, Eugene Pickering, 1874. 

"The pearl of wisdom," I cried, "is love; honest love in 
the most convenient concentration of experience! I advise 
you to fall in love." 



JANUARY 26. The Wings of the Dove, igoj. 

Compressed and concentrated, confined to a single sharp 
pang or two, but none the less in wait for him there 
and lifting its head as that of a snake in the garden, was 
the disconcerting sense that "respect," in their game, 
seemed somehow — he scarce knew what to call it — a fifth 
wheel to the coach. It was properly an inside thing, not 
an outside, a thing to make love greater, not to make hap- 
piness less. 



JANUARY 27. Daisy Miller, 1878. 

It seemed to him also that Daisy had never looked so pret- 
ty; but this had been an observation of his whenever he 
met her. 



JANUARY 28. The Reverberator, 1888. 



Like many unoccupied young men at the present hour he 
gave much attention to art, lived as much as possible in 
that alternative world, where leisure and vagueness are 
so mercifully relieved of their crudity. 



ima, 1886. 



JANUARY 2g. The Princess Casamassima 

She appeared very nearly as resigned to the troubles of 
others as she was to her own. 



JANUARY 30. Pandora, 1884. 

She convinced him, rather effectually, that even in a great 
democracy there are human differences, and that American 
life was full of social distinctions, of delicate shades, 
which foreigners are often too stupid to perceive. 



JANUARY 31' The Ambassadors, 1903. 

It was one of the quiet instants that sometimes settle more 
matters than the outbreaks dear to the historic muse. 



FEBRUARY 



THE winter was not over, but the spring had 
begun, and the smoky London air allowed 
the baffled citizens, by way of a change, to 
see through it. The town could refresh its 
recollections of the sky, and the sky could 
ascertain the geographical position of the 
town. The essential dimness of the low perspectives had 
by no means disappeared, but it had loosened its folds; it 
lingered as a blur of mist, interwoven with pretty sun- 
tints and faint transparencies. There was warmth and 
there was light, and a view of the shutters of shops, and 
the church bells were ringing. 



The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 



FEBRUARY i. The Madonna of the Future, 1873. 

"But meanwhile, the painter's Idea had taken wings. No 
lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact. He 
saw the fair form made perfect; he rose to the vision 
without tremor, without effort of wing ; he communed 
with it face to face, and resolved into finer and lovelier 
truth the purity which completes it as the fragrance com- 
pletes the rose. That's what they call idealism ; the word's 
vastly abused, but the thing 's good. It's my own creed at 
any rate." 



FEBRUARY 2. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account 
could have been given, but which were a daily grace if 
you lived with them; such as the art of being almost 
tragically impatient and yet making it as light as air; of 
being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear as noon; 
of being unmistakably gay, and yet making it as soft as 
dusk. 



FEBRUARY 3. The Portrait of a Lady, 18S1. 

She ultimately made up her mind that to be rich was a 
virtue, because it was to be able to do, and to do was 
sweet. It was the contrary of weakness. To be weak 
was, for a young lady, rather graceful, but, after all, as 
Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that. 



FEBRUARY 4. The Reverberator, 188S, 

His idea of loyalty was that he should scarcely smoke a 
cigar unless his friend were there to take another, and he 
felt rather mean if he went round alone to get shaved. 



FEBRUARY 5. The Awkward Age, 1S99. 

The recurrence of opportunity to observe them together 
would have taught a spectator that — on Mrs. Brook's 
side, doubtless, more particularly — their relation was gov- 
erned by two or three remarkably established and, as 
might have been said, refined laws, the spirit of which was 
to guard against the vulgarity so often coming to the sur- 
face between parent and child. That they were as good 
friends as if Nanda had not been her daughter was a truth 
that no passage between them might fail in one way or 
another to illustrate. 



FEBRUARY 6. Roderick Hudson, iSyS- 

"The whole matter of genius is a mystery. It bloweth 
where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism. 
If it gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down 
altogether we can't set it going again. We must let it 
choose its own pace and hold our breath lest it should lose 
its balance. It's dealt out in different doses, in big cups 
and little, and when you have consumed your portion it's 
as naif to ask for more as it was for Oliver Twist to ask 
for more porridge. Lucky for you if you 've got one of 
the big cups; we drink them down in the dark, and we 
can't tell their size until we tip them up and hear the last 
gurgle. Those of some men last for life; those of others 
for a couple of years." 



FEBRUARY 7. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

This was all he had to point to. However he pointed to 
nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of his real 
cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in com- 
mon with the really void. 



FEBRUARY 8. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

Strange enough it was, and a proof, surely, of our little 
hero's being a genuine artist, that the impressions he had 
accumulated during the last few months appeared to 
mingle and confound themselves with the very sources of 
his craft and to be susceptible of technical representation. 



FEBRUARY g. George Sand (French Poets and 

Novelists), 1878. 

George Sand's optimism, her idealism, are very beautiful, 
and the source of that impression of largeness, luminosity 
and liberality which she makes upon us, but we suspect 
that something even better in a novelist is that tender 
appreciation of actuality which makes even the application 
of a single coat of rose-color an act of violence. 



FEBRUARY 10. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

"Well," said little Bilham, "you're not a person to whom 
it's easy to tell things you don't want to know. Though 
it is easy, I admit — it's quite beautiful," he benevolently 
added, "when you do want to." 



FEBRUARY ii. The Altar of the Dead, iSgS- 

He thought, for a long time, of how the closed eyes of 
dead women could still live — how they could open again, 
in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their 
last. They had looks that remained, as great poets had 
quoted lines. 



FEBRUARY 12. James Russell Lowell, 1891 

(Essays in London), 1893. 

This love of life was so strong in him that he could lose 
himself in little diversions as well as in big books. He 
was fond of everything human and natural, everything 
that had color and character, and no gayety, no sense of 
comedy, was ever more easily kindled by contact. When 
he was not surrounded by great pleasures he could find his 
account in small ones, and no situation could be dull for 
a man in whom all reflection, all reaction, was witty. 



FEBRUARY 13. The Portrait of a Lady, 1 88 1. 

"It 's a sign that I am growing old — that I like to talk 
with younger people. I think it's a very pretty compensa- 
tion. If we can't have youth within us we can have it 
outside of us, and I really think we see it and feel it better 
that way. Of course we must be in sympathy with it — 
that I shall always be. I don't know that I shall ever be 
ill-natured with old people. I hope not; there are cer- 
tainly some old people that I adore. But I shall never be 
ill-natured with the young; they touch me too much." 



FEBRUARY 14. The Marriages, 1892. 



Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she 
would have said — she was perpetually using the expression 
— into touch; but her good intentions were as depressing 
as a tailor's misfits. 



FEBRUARY 15. The Liar, 1SS9. 

When he was working well he found himself in that happy 
state — the happiest of all for an artist — in which things 
in general contribute to the particular idea and fall in 
with it, help it on and justify it, so that he feels for the 
hour as if nothing in the world can happen to him, even 
if it come in the guise of disaster or suffering, that will 
not be an enhancement of his subject. 



FEBRUARY 16. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 



"Our troubles don't kill us, Prince; it 's we who must try 
to kill them. I have buried not a few." 



FEBRUARY 17. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

With his genius in his eyes, his manners on his lips, his 
long career behind him and his honors and rewards all 
round, the great artist, in the course of a single sustained 
look and a few words of delight at receiving him, affected 
our friend as a dazzling prodigy of type. 



FEBRUARY 18. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

She had lived long enough to make out for herself that any 
deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys, and 
that we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly 
conscious of it. 



FEBRUARY 19, The Pension Beaurepas, 1880, 



It sounds as If life went on in a very makeshift fashion 
at the Pension Beaurepas — as if the tone of the establish- 
ment was sordid. But such was not at all the case. We 
were simply very bourgeois; we practised the good old 
Genevese principle of not sacrificing to appearances. This 
is an excellent principle — when you have the reality. 



FEBRUARY 20. The Madonna of the Future, 1873. 

"The mystery was suddenly solved: my friend was an 
American! He must have been to take the picturesque 
so prodigiously to heart!" 



FEBRUARY 21. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

The single thing that was clear, in complications, was 
that, whatever happened, one was to behave as a gentle- 
man — to which was added indeed the perhaps slightly less 
shining truth that complications might sometimes have 
their tedium beguiled by a study of the question how a 
gentleman would behave. 



FEBRUARY 22. James Russell Lowell 1891 

(Essays in London), 1893, 

His America was a country worth hearing about, a mag- 
nificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable 
object of allegiance. If the sign that in Europe one knew 
him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt 
that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in 
whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately 
for him and for his friends he was one of the most whimsi- 
cal, one of the wittiest of human beings, so that he could 
play with his patriotism and make it various. All the 
same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums 
through his finest verse — almost the only passion that, to 
my sense, his poetry contains — the accent of chivalry, of 
the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress. 
James Russell Lowell, b. 1 8 19. 



FEBRUARY 23. A Landscape Painter, 1866. 

"It is your own fault if people don't care for you; you 
don't care for them. That you should be indifferent to 
their good opinion is all very well ; but you don't care for 
their indifference." 



FEBRUARY 24. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

It came back — to his own previous perception — that of the 
Prince's inability, in any matter in which he was con- 
cerned, to conclude. The idiosyncrasy, for him, at each 
stage, had to be demonstrated. And how, when you came 
to that, could you know that a horse wouldn't shy at a 
brass-band, in a country road, because it didn't shy at a 
traction engine? It might have been brought up to trac- 
tion engines without having been brought up to brass- 
bands. 



FEBRUARY 25. Washington Square, 188 1, 

"Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavlnia ; I should 

like her to be a clever woman." 

"My dear Austin, do you think it is better to be clever 

than to be good?" 

"Good for what?" — asked the doctor. "You are good for 

nothing unless you are clever." 



FEBRUARY 26, The Ambassadors, 1903. 

At the back of his head, behind everything, was the sense 
that she was — there, before him, close to him, in vivid, 
imperative form — one of the rare women he had so often 
heard of, read of, thought of, but never met, whose very 
presence, look, voice, the mere contemporaneous fact of 
whom, from the moment it was at all presented, made a 
relation of mere recognition. 



FEBRUARY 27, The Awkward Age, iSqQ- 

"You're so wonderful to your friends" — oh, she could let 
him see that she knew! — "and in such different and ex- 
quisite ways. There are those — ^who get everything out 
of you and whom you really appear to like, or at least to 
put up with, just for that. Then there are those who ask 
nothing — and whom you like in spite of it." 



FEBRUARY 28. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

When Milly smiled it was a public event — when she 
didn't it was a chapter of history. 



FEBRUARY 29. The Bostonians, 1886. 

Her splendid hair seemed to shine ; her cheek and chin had 
a curve which struck him by its fineness ; her eyes and lips 
were full of smiles and greetings. She had appeared to 
him before as a creature of brightness, but how she lighted 
up the place, she irradiated, she made everything that 
surrounded her of no consequence; dropping upon the 
shabby sofa with an eflfect as charming as if she had been 
a nymph sinking on a leopard-skin, and with the native 
sweetness of her voice forcing him to listen till she spoke 
again. 



MARCH 



THE hour I first recall was a morning of winter 
drizzle and mist, of dense fog in the Bay, 
one of the strangest sights of which I was 
on my way to enjoy; and I had stopped in 
the heart of the business quarter to pick up 
a friend who was to be my companion. The 
weather, such as it was, worked wonders for the upper 
reaches of the buildings, round which it drifted and hung 
very much as about the flanks and summits of emergent 
mountain-masses — for, to be just all round, there was 
some evidence of their having a message for the eyes. Let 
me parenthesize, once for all, that there are other 
glimpses of this message, up and down the city, frequently 
to be caught ; lights and shades of winter and summer air, 
of the literally "finishing" afternoon in particular, when 
refinement of modelling descends from the skies and lends 
the white towers, all new and crude and commercial and 
over-windowed as they are, a fleeting distinction. 

The American Scene, iQOy. 



MARCH I. Neiv England, an Autumn Impression^ 

The American Scene, IQO^. 

He had turned his steps, for the pleasure of memory, to 
Fresh Pond, dear to the muses of youth, the Sunday after- 
noons of spring, and had to accept there his clearest vision 
perhaps of the new differences and indifferences. The 
desecrated, the destro^'ed resort had favored, save on rare 
feast days, the single stroll, or at the worst the double, 
dedicated to shared literary secrets; which was why I 
almost angrily missed, among the ruins, what I had mainly 
gone back to recover — some echo of the dreams of youth, 
the titles of tales, the communities of friendship, the sym- 
pathies and patience, in fine, of dear W. D. H. 



MARCH 2. The Altar of the Dead, 1895. 

"How you must have loved him!" 

"Women are not like men. They can love even where 

they've suffered." 



MARCH 3. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

"I should be interested to see some sense you don't 
possess." 

"The moral, dear Mrs. Asslngham. I mean, always, as 
you others consider it. I've of course something that in 
our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. 
But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone stair- 
case — half ruined into the bargain ! — in some castle of our 
quattro cento is like the lightning elevator in one of Mr. 
Verver's fifteen-story buildings. Your moral sense works 
by steam — it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and 
steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing 
that — well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn 
round and come down again. 



MARCH 4. Poor Richard, 1867. 

He had told her that she was an enchantress, and this 
assertion, too, had its measure of truth. But her spell was 
a steady one ; it sprang not from her beauty, her wit, her 
grace — it sprang from her character. In other words 
Gertrude exercised the magnificent power of making her 
lover forget her face. 



MARCH 5. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

Densher himself was not unconscious in respect to this of 
a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; won- 
dering indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might 
move American nerves. He had only heard of them be- 
fore, but in his recent tour he had caught them in the 
fact, and there was now a moment or two when it came 
to him that he had perhaps — and not in the way of an 
escape — taken a lesson from them. 



MARCH 6. George du Maurier, 1883 (Partial 
Portraits), 1888, 

Du Maurier possesses in perfection the independence of 
the genuine artist in the presence of a hundred worldly 
superstitions and absurdities. We have said, however, 
that the morality, so to speak, of his drawings was a sub- 
ordinate question: what we wished to insist upon is their 
completeness, their grace, their beauty, their rare pictorial 
character. 



MARCH 7. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 



"A large fortune means freedom, and I am afraid of that. 
It's such a fine thing and one should make such a good 
use of it. If one didn't, one would be ashamed. And 
one must always be thinking — it's a constant effort. I 
am not sure it's not a greater happiness to be powerless." 
*'For weak people I have no doubt it's a greater happiness. 
For weak people the effort not to be contemptible must be 
great." 



MARCH 8. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

"I fancy it is our peculiar good luck that we don't see the 
limits of our minds," said Rowland. "We are young, 
compared with what we may one day be. That belongs 
to youth; it is perhaps the best part of it. They say that 
old people do find themselves at last face to face with a 
solid blank wall and stand thumping against it in vain. 
It resounds, it seems to have something beyond it, but it 
won't move! That's only a reason for living with open 
doors as long as we can." 



MARCH g. The Reverberator, 1888, 

For these candid minds the newspapers and all they con- 
tained were a part of the general fatality of things, of 
the recurrent freshness of the universe, coming out like 
the sun in the morning or the stars at night. 



MARCH 10. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

"Do you consider that we are careless of mankind? — liv- 
ing as we do in the biggest crowd in the w^orld, and run- 
ning about always pursued and pursuing." 
**Well I don't know. We get nothing but the fun, do 
we: 

''No," she hastened to declare; "we certainly get nothing 
but the fun." 

"We do it all," he had remarked, "so beautifully." 
"We do it all so beautifully. I see what you mean." 
"Well, I mean too," he had gone on, "that we haven't, no 
doubt, enough, the sense of difficulty." 
"Enough? Enough for what?" 
"Enough not to be selfish." 



MARCH II. Washington Square, l88l. 

In those days in New York there were still a few altar- 
fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, 
and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter 
present herself, with a classic grace, as priestess of this 
mild faith. 



MARCH 12. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

It was rich, romantic, abysmal, to have, as was evident, 
thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and Intelli- 
gence and. If not beauty, at least in equalmeasure, a high, 
dim, charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better, 
and then, on top of all, to enjoy boundless freedom, the 
freedom of the wind In the desert — It was unspeakably 
touching to be so equipped and yet to have been reduced 
by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes. 



MARCH 13. The Altar of the Dead, 1895. 

But the time he gave to his devotion came to seem to him 
more a contribution to his other interests than a betrayal 
of them. Even a loaded life might be easier when one had 
added a new necessitv to it. 



MARCH 14. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

"One mustn't take advantage of her character — one 
mustn't, if not for her, at least for one's self. She saves 
one such trouble." 

"She certainly gives one no trouble. — She's not selfish — 
God forgive her! — enough." 

That's what I mean — she's not selfish enough. There's 
nothing, absolutely, that one need do for her. She's so 
modest — she doesn't miss things. I mean if you love her 
rather, I should say, if she loves you. She lets it go." 



MARCH 15. The Princess Casamassima, 1886, 

He had still a delighted attention to spare for the green 
dimness of leafy lanes, the attraction of meadow-paths 
that led from stile to stile and seemed a clue to some pas- 
toral happiness, some secret of the fields; the hedges thick 
with flowers, bewilderingly common, for which he knew 
no names, the picture-making quality of thatched cottages, 
the mystery and sweetness of blue distances, the bloom of 
rural complexions, the quaintness of little girls bobbing 
curtsies by waysides (a sort of homage he had never pre- 
figured) ; the soft sense of the turf under feet that had 
never ached but from paving stones. 



MARCH 16. The Awkward Age, 1899. 

"My dear thing, it all comes back, as everything always 
does, simply to personal pluck. It's only a question, no 
matter when or where, of having enough." 



MARCH 17. The Europeans, 1878. 

It is beside the matter to say he had a good conscience; 
for the best conscience is a sort of self-reproach, and this 
young man's brilliantly healthy nature spent itself in 
objective good intentions which were ignorant of any test 
save exactness in hitting the mark. 



MARCH 18. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

Once more, as a man conscious of having known many 
women, he could assist, as he would have called it, at the 
recurrent, the predestined phenomenon, the thing always 
as certain as sunrise or the coming round of Saints' days, 
the doing by the woman of the thing that gave her away. 
She did it, ever, inevitably, infallibly — she couldn't possi- 
bly not do it. It w^as her nature, it was her life, and the 
man could always expect it without lifting a finger. 



MARCH 19- The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

Of course the danger of a high spirit is the danger of 
inconsistency — the danger of keeping up the flag after the 
place has surrendered ; a sort of behavior so anomalous as 
to be almost a dishonor to the flag. 



MARCH 20. The Reverberator, 1888. 

She thought of the lively and chatty letters that they 
had always seen in the papers and wondered whether they 
all meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, 
a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls' engagements- 



MARCH 21. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

An ability, of a truth, is an aid to success ; it has even been 
known to be the principle of large accumulations. 



MARCH 22. Europe, 1900, 



Jane's yearning was the sharpest. She struggled with it 
as people at Brookbridge mostly struggled with what they 
liked, but fate, by threatening to prevent what she ^/Vliked, 
and what was therefore duty — ^which was to stay at home 
Instead of Maria — had bewildered her, I judged, not a 
little. 



MARCH 23, A Landscape Painter, 1866, 

"There are not five people in the world who really care for 
me." — ''Really care? I am afraid you look too close. 
And then I think five good friends is a very large number. 
I think myself very well ofE with half a one. But if you 
are friendless it's probably your own fault." 



MARCH 24. The Bostonians, 1886, 

It was recognized, liberally enough, that there were many 
things — perhaps even too many — New York could give; 
but this was felt to make no difference in the constant fact 
that what you had most to do under the discipline of life, 
or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave. 
Boston could help you to that as nothing else could. 



MARCH 25. The Awkward Age, 1899, 

Nanda had gathered up, for that matter, early In life, a 
flower of maternal wisdom: ''People talk about the con- 
science, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a 
certain point and leave it there. You can let your con- 
science alone if you're nice to the second housemaid." 



MARCH 26, Roderick Hudson, 1875. 



"To be young and elastic, and yet old enough and wise 
enough to discriminate and reflect, and to come to Italy 
for the first time — that's one of the greatest pleasures 
life has to ofEer us." 



MARCH 27. The Ambassadors^ 1903. 

No one could explain better when needful, nor put more 
conscience into an account or a report; which burden of 
conscience is perhaps exactly the reason why his heart al- 
ways sank when the clouds of explanation gathered. His 
highest ingenuity was in keeping the sky of life clear of 
them. Whether or no he had a grand idea of the lucid, 
he held that nothing ever was in fact — for any one else — 
explained. One went through the vain motions, but it 
was mostly a waste of life. A personal relation was a 
relation only so long as people perfectly understood it, 
or better still didn't care if they didn't. From the moment 
they cared if they didn't it was living by the sweat of one's 
brow; and the sweat of one's brow was just what one 
might buy one's self off from by keeping the ground free 
of the wild weed of delusion. This easily grew too fast. 



MARCH 28. The Lesson of the Master, 1892. 

**Now the question is whether you can do it for two or 
three. Is that the stuff you're made of?" 
"I could do it for one, if j^ou were the one." 
"The 'one' is of course oneself — one's conscience, one's 
idea, the singleness of one's aim. I think of that pure 
spirit as a man thinks of a woman whom, in some detested 
hour of his youth he has loved and forsaken. She haunts 
him with reproachful eyes, she lives forever before him." 



MARCH 29. The Awkward Age, 1899. 

It's so charming being liked," she went on, "without being 
approved." 



MARCH 30, ~ The Ambassadors, 1903, 

He had been wondering a minute ago if the boy weren't 
a pagar, and he fourd himself wondering now if he 
weren't by chance a gentleman. It didn't in the least, on 
the spot, spring up helpfully for him that a person couldn't 
at the same time be both. There was nothing at this 
moment in the air to challenge the combination; there 
was everything, on the contrary, to give it something of 
a flourish. 



MARCH 31' ^hat Mmsie Knew, 1S9S. 

And presently she was close to him in one of the chairs, 
with the prettiest of pictures, the sheen of the lake through 
other trees before them and the sound of birds, the splash 
of boats, the play of children in the air. 



APRIL 



THE beauty of the 'Elevated' was that it took 
you up to the Park and brought you back in 
a few minutes, and you had all the rest of 
the hour to walk about and see the place. It 
was so pleasant now that one was glad to see 
it twice over. The long, narrow inclosure, 
across which the houses in the streets that border it look 
at each other with their glittering windows, bristled with 
the raw delicacy of April, and, in spite of its rockwork 
grottoes and tunnels, its pavilions and statues, its too im- 
mense paths and pavements, lakes too big for the land- 
scape and bridges too big for the lakes, expressed all the 
fragrance and freshness of the most charming moment of 
the year. 

The Bosfonians. 



APRIL I. The Madonna of the Future, 1873. 

"But do you know my own thought? Nothing is so Idle 
as to talk about our want of a nutritive soil, of oppor- 
tunity, of inspiration, and all the rest of it. The worthy 
part is to do something fine! There's no law in our 
glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create, achieve! 
No matter if you have to study fifty times as much as one 
of these! What else are you an artist for?" 



APRIL 2, James Russell Lowell, 1891 (Essays in 

London), iSgj. 

Two of these happy summer days on the occasion of his 
last visit to Whitby are marked possessions of my memory ; 
one of them a ramble on the warm, wide moors, after a 
rough lunch at a little, stony upland inn, in company 
charming and intimate, the thought of which to-day is a 
reference to a double loss.* 

^Allusion to the late Alfred St. Johnston. 



APRIL 3, The Author of ''Beltraffio'*, iSSS- 

No portrait that I have seen gives any idea of his expres- 
sion. There w^ere so many things in it, and they chased 
each other in and out of his face. I have seen people who 
were grave and gay in quick alternation; but Mark 
Ambient was grave and gay at one and the same moment. 



APRIL 4. The Europeans, 1878, 

His faculty of enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously 
eager, that one felt it had a permanent advance on em- 
barrassment and sorrow. 



APRIL 5. The Awkward Age, iSgg, 

Mr. Longdon hadn't made his house, he had simply lived 
it, and the "taste" of the place — Mitchy in certain con- 
nections abominated the word — was nothing more than 
the beauty of his life. . 



APRIL 6, The Golden Bowl 1904. 

"She lets it go." . 

"She lets what?" 

"Anything — anything that you might do and that you 

don't. She lets everything go but her own disposition to 

be kind to you. It's of herself that she asks efforts — so 

far as she ever has to ask them. She hasn't, much. She 

does everything herself. And that's terrible." 



APRIL 7. Pf^hat Maisie Knew, i8g8. 

The joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends 
that little by little the spirit of hope filled the air and 
finally took possession of the scene. 



APRIL 8, The Lesson of the Master, 1892, 

"She gives away because she overflows. She has hei 
own feelings, her own standards; she doesn't keep re- 
membering that she must be proud." 



APRIL p. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

He had not had the gift of making the most of what he 
tried, and if he had tried and tried again — none but him- 
self knew how often — it appeared to have been that he 
might demonstrate what else, in default of that, could be 
made. Old ghosts of experiments came back to him, old 
drudgeries and delusions and disgusts, old recoveries with 
their relapses, old fevers with their chills, broken moments 
of good faith, others of still better doubt; adventures, for 
the most part, of the sort qualified as lessons. 



APRIL 10. The Princess Casamassima, 1886, 

There were things in his heart and a torment and a hidden 
passion in his life which he should be glad enough to lay 
open to some woman. He believed that perhaps this would 
be the cure ultimately; that in return for something he 
might drop, syllable by syllable, into a listening feminine 
ear, certain other words would be spoken to him which 
would make his pain forever less sharp. 



APRIL II. The Wings of the Dove, 1903, 

She was somehow at this hour a very happy woman, and 
a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her 
affections and her views were moving as never before in 
concert. 



APRIL 12. The Author of "Beltraffio/' 1885, 

It was the point of view of the artist to whom every 
manifestation of human energy was a thrilling spectacle, 
and who felt it forever the desire to resolve his experience 
of life into a literary form. 



APRIL 13. Washington Square, 1881, 

Washington Square, where the doctor built himself a 
handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big bal- 
cony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of 
white marble steps ascending to a portal which was also 
faced with white marble. This structure, and many of 
its neighbors, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, 
forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural 
science, and they remain to this day very solid and honor- 
able dwellings. 



APRIL 14, The Lesson of the Master, 1892. 

"Fancy an artist with a plurality of standards to do it: 
to do it ard make it divine is the only thing he has to 
think about. 'Is it done or not?' is his only question. 



APRIL 15. Washington Square, 188 1. 

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was 
found in Washington Square. In front was the large 
quadrangle, containing a considerable quantity of inex- 
pensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which in- 
creased its rural and accessible appearance ; and round the 
corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, 
taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident 
air which already marked it for high destinies. I know 
not whether it be owing to the tenderness of early associa- 
tions, but this portion of New York appears to many per- 
sons the most engaging. It has a kind of established repose 
which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of 
the long shrill city ; it has a riper, richer, more honourable 
look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longi- 
tudinal thoroughfare — the look of having had something 
of a social history. It was here, as you might have been 
informed on good authority, that you had come into a 
world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of in- 
terest; it was here that your grandmother lived, in vener- 
able solitude, and dispensed a hospitality which commend- 
ed itself alike to the infant imagination and the infant 
palate; it was here that you took your first walks abroad, 
following the nursery-maid with unequal step and sniffing 
up the Strang odour of the ailanthus-trees which at that 
time formed the principal umbrage of the square, and dif- 
fused an aroma that you were not yet critical enough to 
dislike as it deserved ; it was here, finally, that your first 
school, kept by a broad-bosomed, broad-based old lady 
with a ferule, who was always having tea in a blue cup, 
with a saucer that didn't match, enlarged the circle both 
of your observations and your sensations. 



APRIL i6. The Figure in the Carpet, 1896. 

"By my little point I mean — what shall I call it? — the 
particular thing I've written my books most for. Isn't there 
for every- writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing 
that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the 
effort to achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very 
passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, 
for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it's 
thatr 



APRIL 17. The Awkward Age, 1899.^ 

Beyond the lawn the house was before him, old, square, 
red-roofed, well assured of its right to the place it took 
up in the world. This was a considerable space — in the 
little world at least of Beccles — and the look of posses- 
sion had everything mixed with it, in the form of old win- 
dows and doors, the tone of old red surfaces, the style of 
old white facings, the age of old high creepers, the long 
confirmation of time. Suggestive of panelled rooms, of 
precious mahogan}^, of portraits of women dead, of colored 
china glimmering through glass doors, and delicate silver 
reflected on bared tables, the thing was one of those im- 
pressions of a particular period that it takes two centuries 
to produce. 



APRIL i8. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

"The other day when I was looking at Michael Angelo's 
Moses I was seized with a kind of defiance — a reaction 
against all this mere passive enjoyment of grandeur. It 
was a rousing great success, certainly, that sat there before 
me, but somehow it wasn't an inscrutable mystery, and it 
seemed to me, not perhaps that I should some day do as 
well, but that at least I mightr 

"As you say, you can but try," said Rowland. "Success 
is only passionate effort." 



APRIL 19. The Art of Fiction, i884> 



There is one point at which the moral sense and the artis- 
tic sense lie very near together, that is in the light of the 
very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of 
art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. 
In proportion as that intelligence is fine will the novel, 
the picture, the statue partake of the substance of beauty 
and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my 
vision, to have purpose enough. 



APRIL 20, The Next Time, 

Popular? — how on earth could it be popular? The thing 
was charming with all his charm and powerful with all 
his power; it was an unscrupulous, an unsparing, a shame- 
less, merciless masterpiece. 



APRIL 21. The Bostonians, 1886. 

She was barely conscious of the loveliness of the day, 
the perfect weather, all suffused and tinted with spring 
which sometimes descends upon New York when the 
winds of March have been stilled. She held her way to 
the Square, which, as all the world knows, is of great ex- 
tent and open to the encircling street. The trees and 
grass-plats had begun to bud and sprout, the fountains 
plashed in the sunshine, the children of the quarter, both 
the dingier types from the south side, who played games 
that required much chalking of the paved walks, and much 
sprawling and crouching there, under the feet of passers, 
and the little curled and feathered people who drove 
their hoops under the eyes of French nurse maids — all the 
infant population filled the vernal air with small sounds 
which had a crude, tender quality, like the leaves and the 
thin herbage. 



APRIL 22. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

"I'm sure j^ou've an excellent spirit; but don't try to bear 
more things than you need." Which after an instant he 
further explained. "Hard things have come to you in 
youth, but you mustn't think life will be for you all hard 
things. You've the right to be happy. You must make 
up your mind to it. You must accept any form in which 
happiness may come." 



APRIL 23. The Birthplace, 1903, 

He felt as if a window had opened into a great green 
woodland, a woodland that had a name, glorious, immor- 
tal, that was peopled with vivid figures, each of them re- 
nowned, and that gave out a murmur, deep as the sound 
of the sea, which was the rustle in forest shade of all the 
poetry, the beauty, the colour of life. 

Ibid. 
"It's rather a pity, you know, that He isnt here. I mean 
as Goethe's at Weimar. For Goethe is at Weimar." 
"Yes, my dear; that's Goethe's bad luck. There he sticks. 
This man* isn't anywhere, I defy you to catch Him." 
"Why not say beautifully," the young woman laughed, 
"that, like the wind, He's everywhere?" 

^Shakespeare, 



APRIL 24, The Next Time, 1895, 

Her disappointments and eventually her privations had 
been many, her discipline severe; but she had ended by 
accepting the long grind of life, and v^^as nov^ quite w^illing 
to be ground in good company. 



APRIL 25. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

Their rightness, the justification of everything — something 
they so felt the pulse of — sat there with them; but 
mightn't the moment possibly count for them as the 
dawn of the discovery that it doesn't always meet all con- 
tingencies to be right? 



APRIL 26. The Tragic Muse, 1889^ 

The other, though only asking to live without too many- 
questions and work without too many disasters, to be glad 
and sorry in short on easy terms, had become aware of a 
certain social tightness, of the fact that life is crowded and 
passion restless, accident frequent and community inevit- 
able. Everybody with whom one had relations had other 
relations too, and even optimism was a mixture and peace 
an embroilment. The only chance was to let everything 
be embroiled but one's temper and everything spoiled but 
one's work. 



APRIL 27, Anthony Trollops, 1883. (Partial 

Portraits), 1888, 



His great, his inestimable merit was a complete apprecia- 
tion of the usual. TroUope, therefore, with his eyes com- 
fortably fixed on the familiar, the actual, was far from 
having invented a new category; his distinction is 
that in resting just there his vision took in so much of the 
field. And then he felt all daily and immediate things as 
well as saw them ; felt them in a simple, direct, salubrious 
way, with their sadness, their gladness, their charm, their 
comicality, all their obvious and measurable meanings. 



APRIL 28, The Altar of the Dead, 1895. 

Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him; 
how little he had achieved the miracle that she had 
achieved! His forgiveness was silence, but hers was nere 
unuttered sound. 



APRIL 2g. The Beast in the Jungle, 1903. 

He told her everything, all his secrets. He talked and 
talked, often making her think of herself as a lean, stiff 
person, destitute of skill or art, but with ear enough to be 
performed to, sometimes strangely touched, at moments 
completely ravished, by a fine violinist. He was her fid- 
dler and genius, she was sure neither of her taste nor of 
his tunes, but if she could do nothing else for him she 
could hold the case while he handled the instrument. 



APRIL JO. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

Such a reflection as that, however, ceased to trouble him 
after he had passed out of doors and begun to roam 
through the park, into which he let himself loose at first, 
and then, in narrowing circles, through the nearer grounds. 
He rambled for an hour in a state of breathless ecstasy; 
brushing the dew from the deep fern and bracken and the 
rich borders of the garden, tasting the fragrant air and 
stopping everywhere, in murmuring rapture, at the touch 
of some exquisite impression. His whole walk was peopled 
with recognitions; he had been dreaming all his life of 
just such a place and such objects, such a morning and such 
a chance. It was the last of April and everything was 
fresh and vivid; the great trees, in the early air, were a 
blur of tender shoots. Round the admirable house he re- 
volved repeatedly — there was something in the way the 
gray walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears 
to his eyes. The spectacle of long duration unassociated 
with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to him ; he 
had lived with people among whom old age meant, for the 
most part, a grudged and degraded survival. In the ma- 
jestic preservation of Medley there was a kind of serenity 
of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour. 



MAY 



H 



E had for the next hour an accidental air of 
looking for it in the windows of shops ; he 
came down the Rue de la Paix in the sun 
and, passing across the Tuileries and the 
river, indulged more than once — as if on 
finding himself determined — in a sudden 
pause before the bookstalls of the opposite quay. In the 
garden of the Tuileries he had lingered, on two or three 
spots, to look ; it was as if the wonderful Paris spring had 
stayed him as he roamed. The prompt Paris morning 
struck its cheerful notes — in a soft breeze and a sprinkled 
smell, in a light flit, over the garden-floor, of bareheaded 
girls with the buckled strap of oblong boxes, in the type 
of ancient thrifty persons basking betimes where terrace 
walls were warm, in the blue-frocked, brass-labelled of- 
ficialism of humble rakers and scrapers, in the deep refer- 
ences of a straight-pacing priest or the sharp ones of a 
white-gaitered, red-legged soldier. He watched little 
brisk figures, figures whose movement was as the tick of 
the great Paris clock, take their smooth diagonal from 
point to point; the air had a taste as of something mixed 
with art, something that presented nature as a white- 
capped masttr-chef. The palace was gone; Strether re- 
membered the palace; and w^hen he gazed into the ir- 
remediable void of its site the historic sense in him might 
have been freely at play — the play under which in Paris 
indeed it so often winces like a touched nerve. He filled 
out spaces with dim symbols of scenes; he caught the gleam 
of white statues at the base of which, with his letters out, 
he could tilt back a straw-bottomed chair. But his drift 
was to the other side, and it floated him unspent up the 
Rue de Seine and as far as the Luxembourg gardens, 
where terraces, alleys, vistas, fountains, little trees in 
green tubs, little women in white caps and shrill little 
girls at play all sunnily "composing" together, he passed 
an hour in which the cup of his impressions truly over- 
flowed. 

The Ambassadors, 1903. 



MAY J. The Lesson of the Master, i8g2, 

''The great thing?" 

"The sense of having done the best — the sense which is 
the real life of the artist and the absence of which is his 
death, of having drawn from his intellectual instrument 
the finest music that nature had hidden in it, of having 
played it as it should be played. He either does that or 
he doesn't — and if he doesn't he isn't worth speaking of. 
And precisely those who really know don't speak of him. 
He may still hear a great chatter, but what he hears most 
is the incorruptible silence of Fame." 



MAY 2. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

Practically, Mrs. Varian's acquaintance with literature 
was confined to the Neiu York Interviewer; as she very 
justly said, after you had read the Interviewer, you had no 
time for anything else. 



MAY 3, The Golden Bowl 1904. 

One of these gaps in Mrs. Assingham's completeness was 
her want of children ; the other was her want of wealth. 
It was wonderful how little either, in the fulness of time, 
came to show; sympathy and curiosity could render their 
objects practically filial, just as an English husband who 
in his military years had "run" everything in his regiment 
could make economy blossom like the rose. 



MAY 4. Pandora, 1884. 

At last the new voyagers began to emerge from below and 
to look about them vaguely, with the suspicious expression 
of face which is to be perceived in the newly embarked, 
and which, as directed to the receding land, resembles that 
of a person who begins to perceive himself the victim of 
a trick. Earth and ocean, in such glances, are made the 
subject of a general objection, and many travellers, in 
these circumstances, have an air at once duped and su- 
perior, H^hich seems to say that they could easily go ashore 
if they would." 



MAY S' Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887 (Partial 

Portraits) 1888. 

It has become the fashion to be effective at the expense of 
the sitter, to make some little point, or inflict some little 
dig, with a heated party air, rather than to catch a talent 
in the fact, follow its line and put a finger on its essence: 
so that the exquisite art of criticism, smothered in gross- 
ness, finds itself turned into a question of "sides." 



MAY 6. The Altar of the Dead, 1895, 



A woman when she was wronged was always more 
wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the 
least she could have got off with was more than the most 
he could have to endure. 



MAY 7. Browning in Westminster Abbey, 1891, 
(Essays in London), 1893, 

His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things 
that, as a race, we like best — the fascination of faith, the 
acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endur- 
ance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of 
character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, 
of the great human passion. If Browning had spoken for 
us in no other way, he ought to have been made sure of, 
tamed and chained as a classic, on account of the extra- 
ordinary beauty of his treatment of the special relation 
between man and woman. 



MAY 8. The Papers, 1903. 

Almost all they had with any security was their youth, 
complete, admirable, very nearly invulnerable, or as yet 
unattackable ; for they didn't count their talent, which they 
had originally taken for granted and had since then lacked 
freedom of mind, as well indeed as any offensive reason, 
to reappraise. 



MAY 9. The Madon na of the Future, 1873, 

"You see I have the great advantage that I lose no time. 
These hours I spend w^ith you are pure profit. They are 
suggest'we\ Just as the truly religious soul is alw^ays at 
worship, the genuine artist is alvv^ays in labour. He takes 
his property w^herever he finds it, and learns some precious 
secret from every object that stands up in the light. If 
you but knew the rapture of observation !" 



MAY 10. The Wings of the Dove, 190 J. 

He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was bom, 
much more than he had acted; except indeed that he re- 
membered thoughts — a few of them — which at the mo- 
ment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like 
adventures. 



MAY II, The Madonna of the Future, 1873. 

"I'm the half of a genius — where In the wide world is 
my other half? Lodged perhaps in the vulgar soul, the 
cunning, ready fingers of some dull copyist or some trivial 
artisan, who turns out by the dozen his easy prodigies of 
touch! But it's not for me to sneer at him, he at least 
does something. He's not a dawdler!" 



MAY 12, What Maisie Knew, i8g8. 



There was at this season a wonderful month of May — 
as soft as a drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one 
awake. 



MAY 13. Eugene Pickering, 1874. 

"I said just now I always supposed I was happy; it's true. 
But now that my eyes are open I see I was only stultified. 
I was like a poodle-dog that is led about by a blue ribbon, 
and scoured and combed and fed on slops. It wasn't life ; 
life is learning to know oneself," 



MAY 14. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

It had a vulgar sound — as throughout in love, the names 
of things, the verbal terms of intercourse, were, compared 
with love itself, vulgar. 



MAY i^. The Awkward Age, iSgg. 

There hung about him still moreover the faded fra- 
grance of the superstition that hospitality not declined is 
one of the things that "oblige." It obliged the thoughts, 
for Mr. Longdon, as well as the manners. 



MAY 1 6. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading 
person she couldn't have imagined; but it w^as all the 
same the truth of tmths that the girl couldn't get aw^ay 
from her wealth. She might leave her conscientious com- 
panion as freely alone with it as possible and never ask a 
question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was in 
the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock 
that she drew over the grass — it was in the curious and 
splendid coils of hair "done" with no eye whatever to the 
jnode du jour, that peeped from under the corresponding 
indifference of her hat, the merely personal tradition that 
suggested a sort of noble inelegance. She couldn't dress 
It away, nor walk It away, nor read It away, nor think It 
away; she could neither smile It away In any dreamy 
absence, nor blow It away In any softened sigh. She 
couldn't have lost It If she had tried — that was what it 
was to be really rich. It had to be the thing you were. 



MAY 17. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 



The day was, even In the heart of London, of a rich, low- 
browed, wTather-washed English typt. So far as this was 
the case the impression of course could only be lost on a 
mere vague Italian; it was one of those things for which 
3'ou had to be, blessedly, an American. 



MAY 18. The Awkward Age, 1899- 



Nanda hovered there slim and charming, feathered and 
ribboned, dressed in thin, fresh fabrics and faint colors. 
"Yes," Mrs. Brook resignedly mused; "you dress for your- 
self." 

"Oh, how can you say that," the girl asked, "when I 
never stick in a pin but what I think of youf 
"Well," Mrs. Brook moralized, "one must always, I con- 
sider, think, as a sort of point de repere, of some one good 
person. Only it's best if it's a person one's afraid of. 
You do ver\^ well, but I'm not enough. What one really 
requires is a kind of salutary terror." 



MAY ig. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

The nearest approach to anxiety indulged in as yet by the 
elder lady was on her taking occasion to wonder if what 
she had more than anything else got hold of mightn't be 
one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the rarest — as she 
called it so that she might call it nothing worse — cases of 
American intensity. Meanwhile, decidedly, it was enough 
that the girl was as charming as she was queer and as 
queer as she was charming — all of which was a rare 
amusement. 



MAY 20. ' The Lesson of Balzac, 1905. 

"Complete" is of course a great word, and there is no art 
at all, we are often reminded, that is not on too many 
sides an abject compromise. The element of compromise 
is always there; it is of the essence; we live w^ith it, and it 
may serve to keep us humble. The formula of the whole 
matter is sufficiently expressed perhaps in a reply I found 
myself once making to an inspired but discouraged friend, 
a fellow-craftsman who had declared in his despair that 
there was no use trying, that it*w^as a form absolutely too 
difficult. "Too difficult indeed ; yet there is one way to 
master it — which is to pretend consistently that it isn't." 

*The novel. 



__^ — — i 

MAY 21. Washington Square, 1881. 

Love demands certain things as a right ; but Catherine had 
no sense of her rights; she had only a consciousness of 
immense and unexpected favours. Her very gratitude for 
these things had hushed itself, as it seemed to hex 
there would be something of impudence in making a festi- 
val of her secret. 



MAY 22. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 



There were ten days left of the beautiful month of May 
— the most precious month of all to the true Rome-lover. 
The sky was a blaze of blue, and the plash of the foun- 
tains, in their mossy niches, had lost it's chill and doubled 
it's music. On the corners of the warm, bright streets one 
stumbled upon bundles of flowers. 



MAY 23 The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to 
like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming 
w^oman she was at least a very good fellow. She was 
wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was 
brave, and one never quite saw the end of the value ot 
that. 



MAY 24. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

His life would be full of machinery, which was the anti- 
dote to superstition ; which was, in its turn, too much the 
consequence, or at least the exhalation, of archives. 



MAY 25. Emerson, 1SS7. (Partial Portraits), 18S8. 

We have the Impression, somehow, that life had never 
bribed him to look at anything but the soul ; and indeed 
in the world in which he grew up and lived the bribes and 
lures, the beguilements and prizes, were few. He was in 
an admirable position for showing, what he constantly en- 
deavored to show, that the prize was within. 



MAY 26. The Portrait of a Lady, 1 881. 

"You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking 
romantic views — that is your great illusion, my dear. But 
we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life 
to please no-one at all — not even yourself." 



MAY 27. The Golden Bowl, 1904, 

It fell in easily with the tenderness of her disposition to 
remember she might occasionally make him happy by an 
intimate confidence. This was one of her rules — full as 
she was of little rules, considerations, provisions. 



MAY 28, The Awkward Age, 1899, 

"I never really have believed in the existence of friendship 
in big societies — in great towns and great crowds. It's a 
plant that takes time and space and air; and London so- 
ciety is a huge 'squash', as we elegantly call it — an elbow- 
ing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob." 



MAY 2Q. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

"Oh, your friend's a type, the grand old American — what 
shall one call It? The Hebrew prophet, Ezeklel, Jere- 
miah, who used when I was a little girl. In the rue Mon- 
taigne, to come to see my father, and who was usually the 
American minister to the Tulleries or some other court. 
I haven't seen one these ever so many years; the sight of 
it warms my poor old chilled heart; this specimen is 
wonderful. 



MAY 30. James Russell Lowell, 1S91 (Essays 
^ ^ " in London) iSgj. 

To me, at any rate, there is something seductive in the 
way in which, in the Harvard "Commemoration Ode", for 
instance, the air of the study mingles with the hot breath 
of passion. The reader who is eternally bribed by form 
may ask himself whether Mr. Lowell's prose or his poetry 
has the better chance of a long life — the hesitation being 
justified by the rare degree in which the prose has the great 
qualities of style ; but in the presence of some of the splen- 
did stanzas inspired by the war-time (and among them I 
include, of course, the second series of "The Biglow 
Papers") one feels that, whatever shall become of the es- 
says, the transmission from generation to generation of 
such things as these may safely be left to the national con- 
science. 
Decoration Day. 



MAY 31. Pandora, 1S54. 

There appeared now to be a constant danger of marrying 
the American girl; it was something one had to reckon 
with, like the rise in prices, the telephone, the discovery 
of dynamite, the Chassepot rifle, the socialistic spirit; it 
was one of the complications of modern life. 



JUNE 



THE lower windows of the great white house, 
which stood high and square, opened to a 
wide flagged terrace, the parapet of which, 
an old balustrade of stone, was broken in 
the middle of its course by a flight of stone 
steps that descended to a wonderful garden. 
The terrace had the afternoon shade and fairly hung over 
the prospect that dropped away and circled it — the pros- 
pect, beyond the series of gardens, of scattered, splendid 
trees and green glades, an horizon mainly of woods. Nanda 
Brookenham, one day at the end of July, coming out to 
find the place unoccupied as yet by other visitors, stood 
there awhile with an air of happy possession. She moved 
from end to end of the terrace, pausing, gazing about her, 
taking in with a face that showed the pleasure of a brief 
independence the combination of delightful things — of old 
rooms with old decorations that gleamed and gloomed 
through the high windows, of old gardens that squared 
themselves in the wide angles of old walls, of wood-walks 
rustling in the afternoon breeze and stretching away to 
further reaches of solitude and summer. The scene had 
an expectant stillness that she was too charmed to desire 
to break; she watched it, listened to it, followed with her 
eyes the white butterflies among the flowers below her, 
then gave a start as the cry of a peacock came to her from 
an unseen alley. 

The Awkward Age, igo4. 



JUNE I. Charles Baudelaire (French Poets and 

Novelists) 1878. 

To deny the relevancy of subject-matter and the import- 
ance of the moral quality of a work of art strikes us as, in 
two words, very childish. We do not know what the 
great moralists would say about the matter — they would 
probably treat it very good-humouredly ; but that is not 
the question. There is very little doubt what the great 
artists would say. People of that temper feel that the 
whole thinking man is one, and that to count out the 
moral element in one's appreciation of an artistic total is 
exactly as sane as it would be (if the total were a poem) 
to eliminate all the words in three syllables, or to consider 
only such portions of it as had been written by candle-light. 



JUNE 2. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

"The fact is I've been comfortable so many years that I 
suppose I've got so used to it I don't know it." 
"Yes, that's the bore of comfort," said Lord Warburton, 
"We only know when we're uncomfortable." 



JUNE 3. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

He had perceived on the spot that any serious discussion 
of veracity, of loyalty, or rather of the want of them, 
practically took her unprepared, as if it were quite new to 
her. He had noticed it before: it was the English, the 
American sign that duplicity, like "love", had to be joked 
about. It couldn't be "gone into." 



JUNE 4. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 



The boulevard was all alive, brilliant with illuminations, 
with the variety and gaiety of the crowd, the dazzle of 
shops and cafes seen through uncovered fronts or immense 
lucid plates, the flamboyant porches of theatres and the 
flashing lamps of carriages, the far-spreading murmur of 
talkers and strollers, the uproar of pleasure and pros- 
perity, the general magnificence of Paris on a perfect even- 
ing in June. 



JUNE 5. The Great Condition, igoo, 

"Well, that's what struck me as especially nice, or rather 
as very remarkable in her — her being, with all her attrac- 
tion, one of the obscure seventy millions; a mere little al- 
most nameless tossed-up flower out of the mixed lap of the 
great American people. I mean for the charming person 
she is. I doubt if, after all, any other huge mixed lap — " 
"Yes, if she were English, on those lines, one wouldn't 
look at her, would one? I say, fancy her English." 



JUNE 6. The Reverberator, 1888. 

A fate was rather a cumbersome and formidable possession, 
which it relieved her that some kind person should under- 
take the keeping of. 



JUNE 7. The Author of '^Beltrafflo/' 1S85. 

That was the way many things struck me at that time in 
England ; as if they were reproductions of something that 
existed primarily in art or literature. It was not the pic- 
ture, the poem, the fictive page that seemed to me a copy ; 
these things were the originals, and the life of happy and 
distinguished people was fashioned in their image. 



JUNE 8. The Awkward Age, 1899. 

She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense 
of adventure, yet not too fluttered to wonder if it 
wouldn't have been nappy to bring a book; the charm of 
which, precisely, would have been in feeling everything 
about her too beautiful to let her read. 



JUNE Q. Guy de Maupassant, 1888. 

When It Is a question of an artistic process we must al- 
ways distrust very sharp distinctions, for there is surely 
in every living method a little of ever}' other method. 



JUNE 10. Charles Baudelaire. (French Poets and 
Novelists), 1878. 

People of a lar^e taste prefer rich works to poor ones and 
they are not inclined to assent to the assumption that the 
process Is the whole work. We are safe in believing that 
all this is comfortably clear to most of those who have, in 
any degree, been initiated into art by production. For 
them the subject Is as much a part of their work as their 
hunger Is a part of their dinner. Baudelaire was not so 
far from being of this way of thinking as some of his ad- 
mirers would persuade us; yet we may say on the whole 
that he was the victim of a grotesque illusion. He tried 
to make fine verses on Ignoble subjects, and in our opinion 
he signally failed. He gives, as a poet, a perpetual Im- 
pression of discomfort and pain. He went In search of 
corruption, and the Ill-conditioned jade proved a thankless 
muse. The thinking reader, feeling himself, as a critic, all 
one, as we have said, finds the beauty nullified by the ugli- 
ness. 



JUNE II. The Princess Casamass'una, 1886. 

"And indeed I have spoken just because the air is sweet, 
and the place ornamental, and the day a holiday, and your 
company exhilarating. All this has had the effect that an 
object has if you plunge it into a cup of water — the water 
overflows." 



JUNE 12. Eugene Pickering, 1874. 



His mind was admirably active, and always, after an 
hour's talk with him, I asked myself what experience could 
really do, that innocence hadn't done to make it bright 
and fine. 



JUNE 13, The Beldonald Holbein, 1903. 

Of course, furthermore, "it took" in particular "our set", 

with its positive child-terror of the banal, to be either so 
foolish or so wise; though indeed I've never quite known 
where our set begins and ends, and have had to content 
myself on this score with the indication once given me 
by a lady next whom I was placed at dinner: "Oh, it's 
bounded on the north by Ibsen and on the south by Sar- 
gent." 



JUNE 14. Roderick Hudson, 1875, 

There was a fresco of Guercino, to which Rowland, 
though he had seen it on his former visit to Rome, went 
dutifully to pay his respects. But Roderick, though he 
had never seen it, declared that it couldn't be worth a fig, 
and that he didn't care to look at ugly things. He re- 
mained stretched on his overcoat, which he had spread on 
the grass, while Rowland went off envying the intellectual 
comfort of genius which can arrive at serene conclusions 
without disagreeable processes. 



JUNE 15. The Bostonians, 1886. 

Miss Birdseye's voice expressed only the cheerful 
weariness which had marked all this last period of her life, 
and which seemed to make it now as blissful as it was suit- 
able that she should pass away. There was, to Ransom 
something almost august in the trustful renunciation of 
her countenance; something in it seemed to say that she 
had been ready long before, but as the time was not ripe 
she had waited, with her usual faith that all was for the 
best; only, at present, since the right conditions met, she 
couldn't help feeling that it was quite a luxury, the great- 
est she had ever tasted. 



JUNE 16, The Wings of the Dove, 1903, 

"One could alm.ost pity him — he has had such a good 
conscience." "That's exactly the inevitable ass". "Yes, 
but it wasn't — I could see from the only few things she 
first told me — that he meant her the least harm. He in- 
tended none whatever." 
"That's always the ass at his worst." 



JUNE 17. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

It must be added, however, that, thanks to his constant 
habit of shaking the bottle in which life handed him the 
wine of experience, he presently found the taste of the 
lees, rising, as usual, into his draught. 



JUNE 18. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

Their feeling was — or at any rate their modest general 
plea — that there was no place they would have liked to 
go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked, 
wherever they were, the place to which they had been 
brought. 



JUNE ig. George Sand. (French Poets and 

Novelists), 1878. 

On one side an extraordinary familiarity with the things 
of the mind, the play of character, the psychological mys- 
tery, and a beautiful clearness and quietness, a beautiful 
instinct of justice in dealing with them; on the other side 
a startling absence of delicacy, of reticence, of the sense 
of certain spiritual sanctities and reserves. 



JUNE 20. The Wings of the Dove, igoj. 

Excitement, for each of them had naturally dropped, 
and — what they had left behind, or tried to, the great 
serious facts of life — were once more coming into sight as 
objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear. 



JUNE 21. Roderick Hudson, 1875, 

Rowland watched the shadows on Mount Holyoke, lis- 
tened to the gurgle of the river, and sniffed the balsam of 
the pines. A gentle breeze had begun to tickle their sum- 
mits, and brought the smell of the mown grass across from 
the elm-dotted river meadows. It seemed to him beauti- 
ful, and suddenly a strange feeling of prospective regret 
took possession of him. Something seemed to tell him that 
later, in a foreign land, he should remember it with long- 
ing and regret. 

"It's a wretched business," he said, "this virtual quarrel of 
ours with our own country, this everlasting impatience to 
get out of it. Is one's only safety then in flight? This 
is an American day, an American landscape, an American 
atmosphere. It certainly has its merits, and some time 
when I am shivering with ague in classic Italy I shall ac- 
cuse myself of having slighted them. 



JUNE 22. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

She was none the less plucky for being at bottom a shame- 
less Philistine, ambitious of a front garden with rock- 
work ; and she presented the plebeian character in none 
the less plastic a form. 



JUNE 23. The Bostonians, 1886. 

Tluy wandered along the rocky waterside to a rocky 
sli rub-covered point, which made a walk of just the right 
duration. Here all the homely languor of the region, the 
mild, fragrant Cape quality, the sweetness of white sands, 
quiet waters, low promontories where there were paths 
amid the barberries and tidal pools gleamed in the sunset 
— here all the spirit of a ripe summer afternoon seemed 
to hang in the air. There were wood-walks too; they 
sometimes followed bosky uplands, where accident had 
grouped the trees with odd effects of "style", and where in 
grassy intervals and fragrant nooks of rest they came out 
upon sudden patches of Arcady. 



JUNE 24. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

A dissatisfied mind, whatever else it lack, is rarely in want 
of reasons; they bloom as thick as butterflies in June. 



JUNE 25. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

Gloriani with his head on one side, pulling his long mous- 
tache and looking keenly from half-closed eyes at the 
lighted marble, represented art with a worldly motive, 
skill unleavened by faith, the mere base maximum of 
cleverness. 



JUNE 26. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

"You're being used for a thing you ain't fit for. People 
don't take a fine-tooth comb to groom a horse." 
"Am I a fine-tooth comb." Strether laughed." It's some- 
thing I never called myself !" 

"It's what you are, all the same. You ain't so young as 
you were, but you've kept your teeth." 



JUNE 27. JVhat Maisie Knew, 1898. 



She was passively comical — a person whom people, to 
make talk lively, described to each other and imitated. 



JUNE 28. The Europeans, 1878, 



It gave her, nevertheless, a pleasure that had some of the 
charm of unwontedness to feel, with that admirable keen- 
ness with which she was capable of feeling things, that he 
had a disposition without any edges; that even his humor- 
ous irony always softened toward the point. 



JUNE 2g. The Awkward Age, 1899, 

A person who knew him well would, if present at the 
scene, have found occasion in it to be freshly aware that 
he was, in his quiet way, master of two distinct kinds of 
urbanity, the kind that added to distance and the kind that 
diminished it. 



JUNE 30. The Madonna of the Future, 1873, 

"He lived and moved altogether in his own little 
province of art. A creature more unsullied by the world 
it is impossible to conceive, and I often thought it a flaw 
in his artistic character that -he had not a harmless vice or 
two. It amused me greatly at times to think that he was 
of our shrewd Yankee race; but, after all, there could be 
no better token of his American origin than this high 
aesthetic fever. The very heat of his devotion was a sign 
of conversion ; those born to European opportunity manage 
better to reconcile enthusiasm with comfort." 



JULY 

WE kept to the fields and copses and com- 
mons, and breathed the same sweet air 
as the nibblinj^ donkeys and the browsing 
sheep, wliose woolliness seemed to me, in 
those early days of my acquaintance with 
English objects, but a part of the gen- 
eral texture of the small dense landscape, which looked 
as if the harvest were gathered by the shears. Everything 
was full of expression — from the big, bandy-legged geese, 
whose whiteness was a "note," amid all the tones of green, 
as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the fore- 
ground of a thatched and white-washed inn, with a grassy 
approach and a pictorial sign — from these humble way- 
side animals to the crest of high woods which let a gable 
or a pinacle peep here and there, and looked, even at a 
distance, like trees of good company, conscious of an indi- 
vidual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the 
faint-hued heather, and I was forever stopping to say how 
charmin!?; T thought the thread-like foot paths across the 
fields, which wandered in a diagonal of finer grain, from 
one smooth tile to another. We sat and smoked upon 
stiles, broaching paradoxes in the decent English air, we 
took short cuts across a park or two, where the bracken 
was deep, and my companion nodded to the old woman at 
the gate. We skirted rank covers, which rustled here and 
there as we passed, and we stretched ourselves at last on 
a heathery hillside where, if the sun was not too hot, 
neither was the earth too cold, and where the country lay 
beneath us in a rich blue mist. 

The Author of ''Beltraffio;* 1S85, 



JULY I. The Europeans, 1878. 

''You strike me as very capable of enjoying, if the chance 
were given you, and yet at the same time as incapable of 
wrong-doing." 

"What ought one to do? To give parties, to go to the 
theatre, to read novels, to keep late hours?" 
"I don't think it's what one does or doesn't do that pro- 
motes enjoyment," her companion answered. "It is the 
general way of looking at life." 

"They look at it as a discipline — that is what they do here. 
I have often been told that." 

"Well, that's very good. But there is another way — to 
look at it as an opportunity." 



JULY 2. The Golden Bozul, 1904. 

He knew his ante natal history, knew it in every detail, 
ard it was a thing to keep causes well before him. What 
was his frank judgment of so much of its ugliness, he 
asked himself, but a part of the cultivation of humility? 
If what had come to him wouldn't do he must make 
something different. 



JULY J?. The Pension Beaurepas, 1B7O. 

"Some things — some differences — are felt, not learned. 
To you liberty is not natural; you are like a person who 
has bought a repeater and in his satisfaction, is constantly 
making it sound. To a real American girl her liberty is a 
very vulgarly ticking old clock." 



JULY 4. Charles Baudelaire. (French Poets and 

Novelists,) 1878. 

He knew evil not by experience, not as something within 
himself, but by contemplation and curiosity, as something 
outside of himself, by which his own intellectual agility 
W2LS not in the least discomposed, rather, indeed (as we 
say his fancy was of a dusky cast) agreeably flattered and 
stimulated. In the former case, Baudelaire, with his other 
gifts, might have been a great poet. But, as it is, evil for 
him begins outside and not inside, and consists primarily 
of a great deal of lurid landscape and unclean furniture. 
This is an almost ludicrously puerile view of the matter — 
a good way to embrace Baudelaire at a glance is to say that 
he was, in his treatment of evil, exactly what Hawthorne 
was not — Hawthorne, who felt the thing at its source, 
deep in the human consciousness. Baudelaire's infinitely 
slighter volume of genius apart, he was a sort of Haw- 
thorne reversed. 
Nathaniel Hawthorne b. 



JULY 5. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

For it may immediately be mentioned that this amiable 
man bethought himself of his personal advantage, in gen- 
eral, only when it might appear to him that other ad- 
vantages, those of other persons, had successfully put in 
their claim. It may be mentioned also that he always 
figured other persons — such was the law of his nature — 
as a numerous array. 



JULY 6. An International Episode, 1B79. 



"I must say I think that when one goes to a foreign coun- 
tr)^, one ought to enjoy the differences. Of course there 
are differences; otherwise what did one come abroad for?" 



JULY 7. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

In the long afternoons, of which the length was but 
the measure of her gratified eagerness, they took a boat on 
the river, the dear little river, as Isabel called it, where 
the opposite shore seemed still a part of the foreground of 
the landscape; or drove over the country in a phaeton — a 
low, capacious, thick-wheeled phaeton. Isabel enjoyed it 
largely, and, handling the reins in a manner which ap- 
proved itself to the groom as "knowing," was never weary 
of driving her uncle's capital horses through winding 
lawns and byways full of the rural incidents she had con- 
fidently expected to find; past cottages thatched and tim- 
bered, past ale-houses latticed and sanded, past patches of 
ancient common and glimpses of empty parks, between 
hedgerows made thick by midsummer. 



JULY 8. The Art of Fiction, 1884. 

To what degree a purpose in a work of art is a source of 
corruption I shall not attempt to enquire; the one that 
seems to me least dangerous is the purpose of making a 
perfect work. 



JULY p. What Maisie Knew, i8g8. 

She knew governesses were poor ; Miss Overmore was un- 
mentionably and Mrs. Wix familiarly so. Neither this, 
however, nor the old brown frock, nor the diadem, nor 
the button, made a difference for Maisie in the charm 
put forth through everything, the charm of Mrs. Wix's 
conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her poverty, 
she was peculiarly and soothingly safe, safer than anyone 
in the world — than papa, than mamma, than the lady with 
the arched eyebrows; safer even, though much less beauti- 
ful, than Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as she sup- 
posed it, the little girl was faintly conscious that one 
couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and kissed for 
good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Ma- 
tilda, who was in heaven, and yet, embarrassingly, also in 
Kensal Green, where they had been together to see her 
little huddled grave. 



JULY 10, Ivan Turgenieff, (Partial Portraits,) 1884. 

Like all men of a large pattern, he was composed of many 
dififerent pieces; and what was always striking in him was 
the mixture of simplicity with the fruit of the most various 
observation. 



JULY II. The Liar, 1S89. 

Women have no faculty of iina<^ination with regard to a 
man's work beyond a vague idea that it doesn't matter. 



JULY 12. The Europeans, 1878. 

One could trust him, at any rate, round all the corners 
of the world ; and, withal, he was not absolutely simple, 
which would have been excess; he was only relatively 
simple. 



JULY 13. The Bostonians, 1S86. 

Olive had seen how Verena was moved by Miss Birdseye's 
death; how at the sight of that unique woman's majesti- 
cally simple withdrawal from a scene in which she had held 
every vulgar aspiration, every worldly standard and lure, 
so cheap, the girl had been touched again with the spirit 
of their most confidant hours, had flamed up with the faith 
that no narrow personal joy could compare in sweetness 
with the idea of doing something for those who had always 
suffered and who waited still. 



JULY 14. The Great Good Place, 1900. 

''There it is. The thing's so perfect that it's open to as 
many interpretations as any other great work — a poem of 
Goethe, a dialogue of Plato, a symphony of Beethoven. 
'*It simply stands quiet, you mean," Sam said, "and lets 
us call it names?" "Yes, but all such loving ones." 



JULY 75. Roderick Hudson, 1S75, 

"But what you say," she said at last, "means change!" 

"Change for the better!" cried Rowland. 

"How can one tell? As one stands one knows the worst. 

It seems to me very frightful to develop." 

"One is in for it in one way or another, and one might 

as well do it with a good grace as with a bad! Since one 

can't escape life It is better to take It by the hand." 



JULY 16. The Wings of the Dove, igoS- 

It had never been pride, Maud Manningham, had hinted, 
that kept her from crying when other things made for it; 
it had only been that these same things, at such times, 
made still more for business, arrangements, correspond- 
ence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of servants, the 
taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said, 
"if I weren't writing letters." 



JULY 17. The Lesson of the Master, 1S92. 

He saw more in his face, and he liked it the better for its 
net telling its whole story in the first three minutes, l^hat 
story came out as one read, in short instalments. 



JULY 18. Washington Square, 1881. 

In a country in which, to play a social part, you must 
either earn your income or make believe that you earn 
it, the healing art has appeared in a high degree to com- 
bine the two recognized sources of credit. It belongs to 
the realm of the practical, which in the United States is a 
great recommendation ; and it is touched by the light of 
science — a merit appreciated in a community in which the 
love of knowledge has not always been accompanied by 
leisure and opportunity. 



JULY ig. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

The thick warm air of a London July floated beneath 
them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, 
which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again be- 
came a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here 
and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and 
high above, in a clearer, smokeless zone, a sky still fair and 
luminous, a faint silver star looked down. The sky was 
the same that, far away, in the country, bent over golden 
fields and purple hills and copses where nightingales 
sang; but from this point of view everything that covered 
the earth was ugly and sordid, and seemed to express or to 
represent the weariness of toil. 



JULY 20. The Papers, 1903. 

What held them together was in short that they were in 
the same boat, a cockle-shell in a great rough sea, and 
that the movements required for keeping it afloat were not 
only what the situation safely permitted but also made for 
reciprocity and safety. 



JULY 21, Roderick Hudson, 1S75, 

"The crop we gather depends upon the seed we sow. He 
may be the biggest genius of the age; his potatoes won't 
come up without his hoeing them. If he takes things so 
almighty easy as — well, as one or two young fellows of 
genius I've had under my eye — his produce will never gain 
the prize. Take the word for it of a man who has made 
his way inch by inch and doesn't believe that we wake up 
to find our work done because we have lain all night a 
dreaming of it; any thing worth doing is devilish hard to 
do! If your young gentleman finds things easy and has a 
good time of it and says he likes the life, it's a sign that — 
as I may say — you had better step round to the office and 
look at the books." 



JULY 22. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

At the thought of her limited, stinted life, the patient, 
humdrum effort of her needle and scissors, which had 
ended only in a showroom where there was nothing to 
show and a pensive reference to the cut of sleeves no longer 
worn, the tears again rose to his eyes. 



JULY 23. The Other House, 1896, 



"He's full of stuff — there's a great deal of him, too much 
to come out all at once. He has ability, he has ideas; he 
has absolute honesty; and he has moreover a good stiff 
back of his own. He's a fellow of head ; he's a fellow of 
heart — in short he's a man of gold. 



JULY 24. The Golden Bowl, 1904, 



''Beyond giving her credit for everything, it's none ot 

my business." 

"I don't see how you can give credit without knowing the 

facts." 

"Can't I give it generally — for dignity? Dignity I mean, 

in misfortune." 

"You've got to postulate the misfortune first." 

"Well," said Maggie, "I can do that. Isn't it always a 

misfortune to be — when you're so fine — so wasted? And 

yet," she went on, "not to wail about it, not to look even 

as if you knew It?" 



JULY 2$. The Awkward Age, i8gg. 

Nothing in him was more amiable than the terms main- 
tained between the rigor of his personal habits and his free 
imagination of the habits of others. 



JULY 26, Roderick Hudson, 1S75. 

"The curious thing is that the more the mind takes in, the 
more it has space for, and that all one's ideas are like the 
Irish people at home who live in the different corners of 
a room and take boarders." 



JULY 27. The Ambassadors, 1903, 

It was nothing new to him, however, as we know, that a 
man might have — at all events such a man as he was — an 
amount of experience out of any proportion to his adven- 
tures. 



JULY 28. The Wings' of the Dove, 1903, 

This was the real thing; the real thing was to be quite 
away from the pompous roads, well within the centre and 
on the stretches of shabby grass. Here were benches and 
smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of ball, with 
their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers, 
anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hun- 
dreds of others just in the same box. 



JULY 29. The Next Time, 

''You can't make of a silk purse a sow's ear ! It's grievous 
indeed if you like — there are people who can't be vulgar 
for trying. He can't — it wouldn't come off, I promise 
you, even once. It takes more than trying — it comes by 
grace." 



JULY 30. The Ambassadors, igoj- 

Her head, extremely fair and exquisitely festal, was like a 
happy fancy, a notion of the antique, on an old precious 
medal, some silver coin of the Renaissance ; while her slim 
lightness and brightness, her gayety, her expression, her 
decision, contributed to an effect that might have been felt 
by a poet as half mythological and half conventional. He 
could have compared her to a goddess still partly engaged 
in a morning cloud, or to a sea-nymph waist high in the 
summer surge. 



JULY 31. The Awkward Age, 1899. 



Mr. Longdon's smile was beautiful — it supplied so many 
meanings that when presently he spoke he seemed already 
to have told half his story. 



AUGUST 



THE ripeness of summer lay upon the land, and 
yet there was nothing in the country Basil 
Ransom traversed that seemed of maturity; 
nothing but the apples in the little tough 
dense orchards which gave a suggestion of 
sour fruition here and there, and the tall, 
Dright golden-rod at the bottom of the bare stone dykes. 
There were no fields of yellow grain; only here and there 
a crop of brown hay. But there was a kind of soft scrub- 
biness in the landscape, and a sweetness begotten of low 
horizons, of mild air, with a possibility of summer haze, of 
unguarded inlets where on August mornings the water 
must be brightly blue. He liked the very smell of the soil 
as he wandered along; cool, soft whiffs of evening met him 
at bends of the road which disclosed very little more — 
unless it might be a band of straight-stemmed woodland, 
keeping, a little, the red glow from the west, or (as he 
went further) an old house shingled all over, gray and 
slightly collapsing, which looked down at him from a steep 
bank, at the top of wooden steps. He was already re- 
freshed; he had tasted the breath of nature, measured his 
long grind in New York without a vacation, with the 
repetition of the daily movement up and down the long, 
straight, maddening city, like a bucket in a well or a 
shuttle in a loom. 

The Bostonians, 1886. 



AUGUST J. The Lesson of the Master. 1802 



"I've touched a thousand things, but which one of them 
have I turned into gold ? The artist has to do only with 
that — he knows nothing of any baser metal." 



AUGUST 2, The Golden Bowl. lood 



It had rained heavily in the night, and though the pave- 
ments were now dry, thanks to a cleansing breeze, the 
August morning, with its hovering, thick-drifting clouds 
and freshened air, was cool and grey. The multitudinous 
green of the Park had been deepened, and a wholesome 
smell of irrigation, purging the place of dust and of odours 
less acceptable, rose from the earth. 



AUGUST 3. • Stevenson, Robert Louis, 
■ (Partial Portraits). 1887^ 



The novelist who leaves the extraordinary out of his 
account is liable to awkward confrontations, as we are 
compelled to reflect in this age of newspapers and of uni- 
versal publicity. The next report of the next divorce case 
(to give an instance) shall offer us a picture of astounding 
combinations of circumstance and behaviour, and the an- 
nals of any energetic race are rich in curious anecdote and 
startling example. 



AUGUST 4. ''The Life of George Eliot/' 1885. 
(Partial Portraits). 1888 



The world was, first and foremost, for George Eliot, the 
moral, the intellectual world ; the personal spectacle came 
after; and lovingly, humanly as she regarded it we con 
stantly feel that she cares for the things she finds in it only 
so far as they are types. The philosophic door is always 
open, on her stage, and we are aware that the somewhat 
cooling draught of ethical purpose draws across it. 



A UGUST 5. The Ambassadors, IQ03. 

He felt his own holiday so successfully large and free 
that he was full of allowances and charities in respect to 
those cabined and confined : his instinct towards a spirit 
so strapped down as Waymarsh's was to walk round it 
on tiptoe for fear of waking it up to a sense of losses by 
this time irretrievable. 



AUGUST 6. The Altar of the Dead, iSqS- 

He knew the small vista of her street, closed at the end 
and as dreary as an empty pocket, where the pairs of 
shabby little houses, semi-detached but indissolubly united, 
were like married couples on bad terms. 



AUGUST 7. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 

She liked almost everything, including the English rain. 
"There is always a little of it, and never too much at 
once," she said ; "and it never wets you, and it always 
smells good." She declared that in England the pleasures 
of smell w^ere great — that in this inimitable island there 
was a certain mixture of fog and beer and soot which, 
however odd it might sound, was the national aroma, and 
most agreeable to the nostril. 



AUGUST 8. The Lesson of the Master, 1892. 

"Try to do some really good work." 

"Oh I want to, heaven knows!" 

"Well, you can't do it without sacrifices; don't believe 

that for a moment," said Henry St. George. "I've made 

none. I've had everything. In other words, I've missed 

everything." 



AUGUST g. The Lesson of the Master, 1892. 



"One would like to paint such a girl as that," Overt con- 
tinued. 

"Ah, there it is — there's nothing like life! When you're 
finished, squeezed dry and used up and you think the sack's 
empty, you're still spoken to, you still get touches and 
thrills, the idea springs up — out of the lap of the actual— 
and shows you there's always something to be done." 



AUGUST 10. The Princess Casamassima, 1886, 



Miss Pynsent couldn't embrace the state of mind of 
people who didn't apologize, though she vaguely envied 
and admired it, she herself spending much of her time in 
making excuses for obnoxious acts she had not committed. 



AUGUST II. Eugene Pickering, 1874. 

"I find I'm an active, sentient, intelligent creature, with 
desires, with passions, with possible convictions, — even 
with what I never dreamed of, a possible will of my own! 
I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men and 
women to form a thousand relations with. It all lies there 
like a great surging sea, where we must plunge and dive 
and feel the breeze and breast the waves. I stand shiver- 
ing here on the brink, staring, longing, wondering, charm- 
ed by the smell of the brine and yet afraid of the water." 



AUGUST 12. James Russell Lowell, 1891 (Essays 

in London) J iSgj. 

After a man's long work is over and the sound of his voice 
is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place 
find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The 
hand of death in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, 
made it more typical and general. The figure retained by 
the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have 
dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; 
it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, 
rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. 



AUGUST 13. 



The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 



She was in short a most comfortable, profitable, agree- 
able person to live with. If for Isabel she had a fault it 
was that she was not natural; by which the girl meant, 
not that she was afiEected or pretentious, for from these 
vulgar vices no woman could have been more exempt; but 
that her nature had been too much overlaid by custom and 
her angles too much smoothed. She had become too flex- 
ible, too supple; she was too finished, too civilized. She 
was, in a word, too perfectly the social animal that man 
and woman are supposed to have been intended to be; 
and she had rid herself of every remnant of that tonic 
wildness which we may assume to have belonged even to 
the most amiable persons in the ages before country-house 
life was the fashion. 



AUGUST 14. 



The Bostonians, 1886. 



There were certain afternoons in August, long, beautiful 
and terrible, when one felt that the summer was rounding 
its curve, and the rustle of the full-leaved trees in the 
slanting golden light, in the breeze that ought to be de- 
licious, seemed the voice of the coming autumn, of the 
warnings and dangers of life. 



AUGUST 15. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

She wrote short stories, and she fondly believed she had 
her "note," the art of showing New England without- 
showing it wholly in the kitchen. 



AUGUST 16. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

And he gave Rowland to understand that he meant to live 
freely and largely and be as interested as occasion de- 
manded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a 
menace of grossness, because in the first place there was in 
all dissipation, refine it as one might, a vulgarity which 
would disqualify it for Roderick's favour; and because in 
the second the young sculptor was a man to regard all 
things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to 
his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live 
largely enough without exceeding the circle of pure de- 
lights. 



AUGUST 17. 



The Princess Casamassimaj 1886. 



She summed up the sociable, humorous, ignorant chatter 
of the masses, their capacity for offensive and defensive 
passion, their instinctive perception of their strength on the 
day they should really exercise it; and, as much as any of 
this, their ideal of something snug and prosperous, where 
washed hands and plates in rows on dressers, and stufiEed 
birds under glass, and family photographs, would sym- 
bolize success. 



AUGUST 18. 



The Golden Bowl, 1904. 



Besides, who but himself really knew what he, after all, 
hadn't, or even had, gained? The beauty of her condi- 
tion was keeping him, at any rate, as he might feel, in 
sight of the sea, where, though his personal dips were 
over, the whole thing could shine at him, and the air and 
the plash and the play become for him too a sensation. 
That couldn't be fixed upon him as missing; since if it 
wasn't personally floating, if it wasn't even sitting in the 
sand, it could yet pass very well for breathing the bliss, in 
a communicated irresistible way — for tasting the balm. 



AUGUST ig. The Ambassadors, 1903, 

The great church had no altar for his worship, no direct 
voice for his soul : but it was none the less soothing even to 
sanctity; for he could feel while there what he couldn't 
elsewhere, that he was a plain tired man taking the holi- 
day he had earned. 



AUGUST 20. The Princess Casamassima, 1886, 

"After all, the opinions of our friends are not what we 
love them for, and therefore I don't see why they should 
be what we hate them for." 



AUGUST 21. The Great Condition, igoo. 

The near view of the big queer country had at last, this 
summer, imposed itself: so many other men had got it and 
were making it, in talk, not only a convenience but a good 
deal of a nuisance, that it appeared to have become, de- 
fensively, as necessary as the electric light in the flat one 
might wish to let ; as to which, the two friends, after their 
ten bustling weeks, had now in fact grown to feel that they 
could press the American button with the best. 



AUGUST 22. Roderick Hudson, 1875- 

"Do you know I sometimes think I'm a man of genius, 
half finished? The genius has been left out, the faculty 
of expression is wanting; but the need for expression re- 
m.ains, and I spend my days groping for the latch of a 
closed door." 



AUGUST 23, The Madonna of the Future, iSyS- 

"There Is only one Raphael, but an artist may still be an 
artist; the days of illumination are gone; visions are rare; 
we have to look long to see them. But in meditation we 
may still cultivate the ideal; round it, smooth it, perfect 
it. The result certainly may be less than this; but still 
it may be good, it may be great! — it may hang somewhere, 
in after years, in goodly company, and keep the artist's 
memory warm. Think of being known to mankind after 
some such fashion as this! suspended here through the 
slow centuries in the gaze of an altered world; living on 
and on In the cunning of an eye and hand that are part of 
the dust of ages, a delight and a law to remote generations; 
making beauty a force and purity an example!" 



AUGUST 24. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 

"I judge more than I used to, — but it seems to me that I 
have earned the right. One can't judge till one is forty; 
before that we are too eager, too hard, too cruel, and In 
addition too ignorant." 



AUGUST 2$. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

She had stature without height, grace without motion, 
presence without mass. Slender and simple, frequently 
soundless, she was somehow always in the line of the eye 
— she counted singularly for its pleasure. More ''dressed," 
often with fewer accessories, than other women, or less 
dressed, should occasion require, wnth more, she probably 
couldn't have given the key to these felicities. 



AUGUST 26, The Ambassadors, 1903. 

He walked and walked as if to show himself how little he 
had now to do ; he had nothing to do but turn off to some 
hillside, where he might stretch himself and hear the 
poplar's rustle, and whence — in the course of an afternoon 
so spent, an afternoon richly suffused, too, with the sense 
of a book in his pocket — he should sufficiently command 
the scene to be able to pick out just the right little rustic 
inn for an experiment in respect to dinner. 



AUGUST 27. The Reverberator, 1888. 

His private invitation produced a kind of cheerful glow 
in regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he couldn't 
defend nor lucidly explain nor make people like, but 
whom he had ended, after so many days of familiar inter- 
course, by liking extremely himself. The way to get on 
with them — it was an immense simplification — was just to 
love them; one could do that even if one couldn't talk 
with them. 



AUGUST 28. The Awkward Age, 1899. 

"Nothing is more charming than suddenly to come across 
something sharp and fresh after we've thought there was 
nothing more that could draw from us a groan. We've 
supposed we've had it all, have squeezed the last impres- 
sion out of the last disappointment, penetrated to the last 
familiarity in the last surprise ; then some fine day we find 
that we haven't done justice to life. There are little 
things that pop up and make us feel again. What may 
happen is after all incalculable. There's just a little 
chuck of the dice, and for three minutes we win." 



AUGUST 20. The Portrait of a Lady, i8Si. 

She always ended, however, by feeling that having a 
charming surface doesn't necessarily prove that one is 
superficial. 



AUGUST 30. Broken Wings, 1903. 

Disappointment and despair were in such relations contag- 
ious, and there was clearly as much less again left to her 
as the little that was left to him. He showed her, laugh- 
ing at the long queerness of it, how awfully little, as they 
called it, this was. He let it all come, but with more 
mirth than misery, and with a final abandonment of pride 
that was like changing at the end of a dreadful day from 
tight boots to slippers. 



AUGUST 31. A Landscape Fainter, 1866. 

"How can a man be simple and natural who's known to 
have a large income? That's the supreme curse. It's bad 
enough to have it; to be known to have it, to be known 
only because you have it, is most damnable. 



SEPTEMBER 



I WOKE up, by a quick transition, in the New 
Hampshire mountains, in the deep valleys and the 
wide woodlands, on the forest-fringed slopes, the 
far-seeing crests of the high places, and by the side 
of the liberal streams and the lonely lakes; things 
full, at first, of the sweetness of belated recog- 
nition, that of the sense of some bedimmed summer of the 
distant prime flushing back into life and asking to give 
again as much as possible of what it had given before. 
There hung over these things the Insistent hush of a Sep- 
tember Sunday morning. I went down into the valley — 
that was an impression to woo by stages; I walked beside 
one of those great fields of standing Indian-corn which 
make, to the eye, so perfect a note for the rest of the Amer- 
ican rural picture, throwing the conditions back as far as 
our past permits, rather than forward, as so many other 
things do, into the age to come. The maker of these re- 
flections betook himself at last, in any case, to an expanse 
of rock by a large bend of the Saco, and lingered there 
under the infinite charm of the place. The rich, full lapse 
of the river, the perfect brownness, clear and deep, as of 
liquid agate, in its wide swirl, the large indifferent ease in 
its pace and motion, as of some great benevolent institu- 
tion working smoothly; all this, with the sense of the 
deepening autumn about, gave I scarce know what pas- 
toral nobleness to the scene, something raising it out of 
the reach of even the most restless of analysts. The analyst 
in fact could scarce be restless here; the Impression, so 
strong and so final, persuaded him perfectly to peace. This, 
on September Sunday mornings, was what American 
beauty should be. 

The American Scenes New England, 1907. 



SEPTEMBER i. Guy de Maupassant, 1888. 

It is as difficult to describe an action without glancing at 
its motive, its moral history, as it is to describe a motive 
without glancing at its practical consequence. 



SEPTEMBER 2, 'The Ambassadors, 1903. 

It would doubtless be difficult to-day — to name her and 
place her; she would certainly show, on knowledge, Miss 
Gostrey felt, as one of those convenient types who didn't 
keep 3^ou explaining — minds with doors as numerous as the 
many-tongued cluster of confessionals at St. Peter's. 



SEPTEMBER 3. The Author of "Beltrafjio;' 1903. 

"When I see the kind of things that life does I despair of 
ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, 
life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! 
It takes ever so long to believe it. You don't know yet, 
my dear fellow. It isn't till one has been watching her 
for forty years that one finds out half of what she's up to ! 
Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably contain a 
mass of rot." 



SEPTEMBER 4. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

"It only meant that there are perhaps better things to be 
done with Miss Stant than to criticise her. When once 
you begin that with anyone — !" He was vague and kind. 
"I quite agree that it's better to keep out of it as long as 
one can. But when one must do it — " 
"Yes?" he asked as she paused. 
"Then know what you mean." 



SEPTEMBER 5. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

For this unforunate but remarkably organized youth 
every displeasure or gratification of the visual sense col- 
oured his whole mind, and though he lived in Pentonville 
and worked in Soho, though he was poor and obscure and 
cramped and full of unattainable desires, It may be said 
of him that what was most Important In life for him was- 
simply his impressions. They came from everything he 
touched, they kept him thrilling and throbbing through 
considerable parts of his waking consciousness, and they 
constituted as yet the principal events and stages of his 
career. Fortunately they were sometimes very delightful. 
Everything In the field of observation suggested this or 
that ; everything struck him, penetrated, stirred ; he had, in 
a word, more impressions than he knew what to do with 
— felt sometimes as if they would consume or asphyxiate 
him. 



SEPTEMBER 6. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

These were instants at which he could ask whether, since 
there had been, fundamentally, so little question of his 
keeping anything, the fate after all decreed for him hadn't 
been only to be kept. Kept for something, in that event, 
that he didn't pretend, didn't possibly dare, as yet, to di- 
vine; something that made him hover and wonder and 
laugh and sigh, made him advance and retreat, feeling half 
ashamed of his Impulse to plunge and more than half 
afraid of his Impulse to wait. 



SEPTEMBER 7. What Maiste Knew, 1898. 

Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day hadn't pass- 
ed without such an observer's discovering that she was 
excited and even mentally comparing her state to that of 
the breakers after a gale. 



SEPTEMBER 8. The Papers, 1903. 

"I want, while I'm about it, to pity him in sufficient quan- 
tity." 

"Precisely, which means, for a woman, with extravagance 
and to the point of immorality." 



SEPTEMBER 9. James Russell Lowell 1891 

(Essays in London) 1893, 

His robust and humourous optimism rounds itself more 
and more; he has even now something of the air of a 
classic, and if he really becomes one it will be in virtue 
of his having placed as fine an irony at the service of hope 
as certain masters of the other strain have placed at that 
of despair. 



SEPTEMBER 10. Roderick Hudson, iSyS- 

He had felt an angry desire to protest against a destiny 
which seemed determined to be exclusively salutary. It 
seemed to him he should bear a little spoiling. 



SEPTEMBER ii, Roderick Hudson, 187S' 



The moods of an artist, his exultations and depressions, 
Rowland had often said to himself, were like the pen- 
flourishes a writing master makes in the air when he be- 
gins to set his copy. He may bespatter you with ink, he 
may hit you in the eye, but he writes a magnificent hand. 



SEPTEMBER 12, The Ambassador, 1903. 

The fact that he had failed, as he considered in everything, 
in each relation and in half a dozen trades, as he liked 
luxuriously to put it, might have made, might still make 
for an empty present, but stood expressively for a crowded 
past. It had not been, so much achievement missed, a 
light yoke nor a short road. It was at present as if the 
backward picture had hung there, the long crooked course, 
gray in the shadow of his solitude. It had been a dread- 
ful, cheerful, sociable solitude, a solitude of life, of choice, 
of community; but though there had been people enough 
all round It, there had been but three or four persons In It. 



SEPTEMBER 13. The Letters of Robert Louis 

Stevenson (North American Review) igoo. 

Fate, as if to distinguish him as handsomely as possible, 
seemed to be ever treating him to some chance for an act 
or a course that had almost nothing in its favor but its 
inordinate difficulty. If the difficulty was, in these cases, 
not all the beauty for him, it at least never prevented his 
finding in it — or our finding, at any rate, as observers — so 
much beauty as comes from a great risk accepted either 
for an idea or for simple joy. 



SEPTEMBER 14. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

"At any rate he would have conformed to the great re- 
ligious rule — to live each hour as if it were to be one's 
last." 

"In holiness you mean — in great receuillementf the Prin- 
cess asked. 

"Oh dear, no ; simply in extreme thankfulness for every 
minute that's added." 



SEPTEMBER 15. The Lesson of the Master, 1S92, 

"Ah, perfection, perfection — how one ought to go in for 
it! I wish I could." 

"Everj^one can in his way," said Paul Overt. 
"In his way, yes ; but not in hers. Women are so ham- 
pered — so condemned ! But it's a kind of dishonour if you 
don't, when you want to do something, isn't it?" 



SEPTEMBER 16. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

The extent to w^hich they enjoyed their indifference to any 
judgment of their want of ceremony, what did that of 
itself speak but for the way, that, as a rule, they almost 
equally had others on their mind? They each knew that 
both were full of the superstition of "not hurting," but 
might precisely have been asking themselves, asking in fact 
each other, at this moment, whether that was to be, after 
all, the last word of their conscientious development. 



SEPTEMBER 17, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 



"What is your idea of success?" 

"You evidently think it must be very tame," said Isabel. 

"It's to see some dream of one's youth come true." 



SEPTEMBER 18. The Art of Fiction, 1884. 

Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fer- 
tilizing when they are frank and sincere. 



SEPTEMBER 19 The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 



He saw the immeasurable misery of the people, and yet he 
saw all that had been, as it were, rescued and redeemed 
from it: the treasures, the felicities, the splendours, the 
successes of the world. 



SEPTEMBER 20. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

Rowland complimented her on her fund of useful informa- 
tion. 

"It's not especially useful," she answered; "but I like to 
know the names of plants as I do those of my acquaint- 
ances. When we walk in the woods at home — which we 
do so much — it seems as unnatural not to know what to 
call the flowers as it would be to see some one in the town 
with whom we should not be on speaking terms." 



SEPTEMBER 21. The Great Good Place, igoo. 

There, in its place, was life — with all its rage; the vague 
unrest of the need for action knew it again, the stir of the 
faculty that had been refreshed and reconsecrated. 



SEPTEMBER 22. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

Anyhow, he went forth again into the streets, into the 
squares, into the parks, solicited by an aimless desire to 
steep himself j^et once again in the great indifferent city 
which he knew and loved and which had had so many of 
his smiles and tears and confidences. 



SEPTEMBER 23. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

There was something in Adam Verver's eyes that both ad- 
mitted the morning and the evening in unusual quantities 
and gave the modest area the outward extension of a view 
that was "big"even when restricted to the stars. Deeply 
and changeably blue, though not romantically large, they 
were yet youthfully, almost strangely beautiful, with 
their ambiguity of your scarce knowing if they most car- 
ried their possessor's vision out or most opened themselves 
to your own. 



SEPTEMBER 24, The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 



Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, bright- 
ness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments 
to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole 
setting and by the perception, at the same time, on the ob- 
server's part, that this element gained from her, in a man- 
ner, for eft'ect and harmony, as much as it gave — her 
whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that 
hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering, dropping and 
quavering forth again, like vague, faint, snatches, mere 
ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music. 



SEPTEMBER 25. The Other House, i8g6. 

It would do with the question what It was Mrs. Beever's 
inveterate household practice to do with all loose and un- 
arranged objects — It would get It out of the way. There 
would have been difficulty In saying whether It was a 
feeling for peace or for war, but her constant habit was to 
lay the ground bare for complications that as yet at least 
had never taken place. Her life was like a room pre- 
pared for a dance : the furniture was all against the walls. 



SEPTEMBER 26, The Princess Casamassima, 1886, 

"I haven't the least objection to his feeling badly; that's 
not the worst thing In the world ! If a few more people 
felt badly, in this sodden, stolid, stupid race of ours, the 
world would wake up to an idea or two, and we should 
see the beginning of the dance. It's the dull acceptance, 
the absence of reflection, the impenetrable density." 



SEPTEMBER 27. The JVings of the Dove, jgoj. 

The great historic house had — beyond terrace and gar- 
den, as the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Wat- 
teau composition, a tone as of old gold kept "down" by 
the quality of the air, summer full-flushed, but attuned 
to the general perfect taste. 



SEPTEMBER 28. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

"Her head has great character, great natural style. If a 
woman is not to be a brilliant beauty in the regular way, 
she will choose, if she's wise, to look like that. She will 
not be thought pretty by people in general, and desecrated, 
as she passes, by the stare of every vile wretch who chooses 
to thrust his nose under her bonnet ; but a certain number 
of intelligent people will find it one of the delightful things 
of life to look at her. That lot is as good as another! 
Then she has a beautiful character. 



SEPTEMBER 2g. The Beast in the Jungle, 1903. 



"I sometimes ask myself if it's quite fair. Fair I mean to 
have so involved and — since we may say it — interested 
you. I almost feel as if you hadn't really had time to do 
anything else." 

"Anything else but be interested?" she asked. "Ah, w^hat 
else does one ever want to be?" 



SEPTEMBER 30. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 



She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, 
who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of 
action. 



OCTOBER 



IT might be an ado about trifles — and half the 
poetry, roundabout, the poetry in solution in the 
air, was doubtless but the alertness of the touch 
of Autumn, the imprisoned painter, the Bohemian 
with a rusty jacket, who had already broken out 
with palette and brush; yet the way the color 
begins in those days to be dabbed,, the way, here and there, 
for a start, a solitary maple on a woodside flames in single 
scarlet, recalls nothing so much as the daughter of a 
noble house dressed for a fancy-ball, with the whole fam- 
ily gathered round to admire her before she goes. One 
speaks, at the same time of the orchards; but there are 
properly no orchards when half the countryside shows, 
the easiest, most familiar sacrifice to Pomona. The apple- 
tree in New England plays the part of the olive in Italy, 
charges itself with the effect of detail, for the most part 
otherwise too scantly produced, and, engaged in this 
charming care, becomes infinitely decorative and delicate. 
What it must do for the too under-dressed land in May 
and June is easily supposable; but its office in the early 
autumn is to scatter coral and gold. The apples are 
everywhere and every interval, every old clearing, an or- 
chard. You pick them up from under your feet but to 
bite into them, for fellowship, and throw them away; but 
as you catch their young brightness in the blue air, where 
they suggest strings of strange-colored pearls tangled in 
the knotted boughs, as you notice their manner of swarm- 
ing for a brief and wasted gayety, they seem to ask to be 
praised only by the cheerful shepherd and the oaten pipe. 

The American Scene, New England, igoQ. 



OCTOBER I. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

''What I hate Is myself — when I think that one has to 
take so much, to be happy, out of the lives of others, and 
that one isn't happy, even then. One does it to cheat one s 
self and to stop one's mouth — but that's only, at the best, 
for a little. The wretched self is always there, always 
making one somehow a fresh anxiety. What it comes to is 
this, that it's not, that it's never, a happiness, any happiness 
at all, to take. The only safe thing is to give. It's what 
plays you least false." 



OCTOBER 2. The Madonna of the Future, 1873. 

"He did his best at a venture." I w^nt in and turned my 
steps to the chapel of the tombs. Viewing in sadness the 
sadness of its immortal treasures, I fancied, while I stood 
there, that they needed no ampler commentary than those 
simple words. 



OCTOBER 3. A Most Extraordinary Case, 1868. 



For ten long days, the most memorable days of his life — 
days which, if he had kept a journal, would have been 
left blank — he held his tongue. 



OCTOBER 4. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 



She had found sympathy her best resource. It gave her 
plenty to do; it made her, as she also said, sit up. She 
had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described 
herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had 
known old ladies, in her early American time, drop mor- 
sels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the ma- 
terial for some eventual patchwork quilt- 



OCTOBER 5. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

You think that you can lead a romantic life, that you 
can live by pleasing yourself and pleasing others. You'll 
find you are mistaken. Whatever life you lead you 
must put your soul into it — to make any sort of success 
of it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be 
romance, I assure you ; it becomes reality ! And you can't 
always please yourself; you must sometimes please other 
people. That, I admit, you are very ready to do; but 
there is another thing that is still more important — you 
must often Jwplease others. You must alw^ays be ready 
for that — you must never shrink from it." 



OCTOBER 6. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881, 

"I like places in which things have happened — even if they 
are sad things." 



OCTOBER 7. The Wings of the Dove, igoj. 



The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the 
autumn sunshine, baffled for many days, but now hot and 
almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with an 
almost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was 
one with the bright colour, took large possession. Venice 
glowed and plashed and called and chimed again; the air 
was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, 
blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out of vivid stuffs, 
a laying down of fine carpets. 



OCTOBER 8. The Golden Bowl, 1904, 



'What it comes to is the way she believes in one. That 

is if she believes at all." 

"Yes that's what it comes to." 

"And why should it be terrible?" 

"Because it's always so — the idea of having to pity people." 

"Not when there's also the idea of helping them." 

"Yes, but if we can't help them?" 

"We can — we always can. That is," he competently 

added, "if we care for them»" 



OCTOBER 9. Eugene Pickering, 1874. 

"A man with as good a head and heart as yours has a very 
ample world within himself, and I'm no believer in art 
for art, nor in what's called 'life for life's sake.' Never- 
theless take your plunge, and come and tell me whether 
you've found the pearl of wisdom." 



OCTOBER 10. The Golden Bowl, 1904^ 

"I believe enough things about you, my dear, to have a 
few left if most of them, even, go to smash. I've taken 
care of that. I've divided my faith into water-tight com- 
partments. We must manage not to sink." 
''You do believe I'm not a hypocrite? You recognize that 
I don't lie or dissemble or deceive? Is that water-tight?" 
"Water-tight — the biggest compartment of all? Why, 
it's the best cabin and the main deck and the engine-room 
and the steward's pantry! It's the ship itself — it's the 
whole line. It's the captain's table and all one's luggage — 
one's reading for the trip." 



OCTOBER II. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 



"My Idea Is this, that when you only love a little you're 
naturally not jealous — or are only jealous also a little, so 
that ft doesn't matter. But when you love in a deeper 
and intenser way, then you are, in the same proportion, 
jealous; your jealousy has intensity and, no doubt, ferocity. 
When, however, you love in the most abysmal and unut- 
terable way of all — why then you're beyond everything, 
and nothing can pull you down," 



OCTOBER 12. The Papers, 1903. 



She knew little enough of what she might have to do for 
him, but her hope, as sharp as a pang, was that, if any- 
thing, it would put her in danger too. 



OCTOBER 13. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 



Certainly It came from the sweet taste of solitude, caught 
again and cherished for the hour; always a need of her 
nature, moreover, when things spoke to her with penetra- 
tion. It was mostly in stillness that they spoke to her 
best; amid voices she lost the sense. 



OCTOBER 14. The Bostonians, 1886. 



Positive it is that she spared herself none of the inductions 
of a reverie that seemed to dry up the mists and ambigui- 
ties of life. These hours of backward clearness come to 
all men and women, once at least, when they read the past 
in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like 
unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw 
them before. The journey behind them is mapped out 
and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, 
all its infatuated, deluded geography. 



OCTOBER 15. The Portrait of a Lady, iSSl. 

To be so graceful, so gracious, so wise, so good, and to 
make so light of it all — that was really to be a great lady. 



OCTOBER 16. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 



"I'm acquainted with many of our most important men." 
"Do you mention it as a guarantee, so that I may know 
you're genuine?" 

"Not exactly; that would be weak, wouldn't it?" the 
Princess asked. "My genuineness must be in myself — a 
matter for you to appreciate as you know me better; not 
in my references and vouchers." 



OCTOBER 17. The M.adonna of the Future, 1S73. 

"I suppose we are a genus by ourselves in the providential 
scheme — we talents that can't act, that can't do noi 
dare. We take it out in talk, in plans and promises, in 
study, in visions. But our visions, let me tell you — have 
a way of being brilliant, and a man has not lived in vain 
who has seen the things I've seen!" 



OCTOBER 18. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

"Great in nature, in character, in spirit. Great in life." 
"So?" Mr. Verver echoed, "What has she done — in life?" 
"Well she has been brave and bright," said Maggie. 
"That mayn't sound like much, but she has been so in the 
face of things that might well have made it too difficult 
for many other girls." 



OCTOBER 19, The Altar of the Dead, 1895. 



But half the satisfaction of the spot, for this mysterious 
and fitful worshipper, was that he found the years of his 
life there, and the ties, the affections, the struggles, the 
submissions, the conquests — all conducing as to a record 
of that adventurous journey in which the beginnings and 
the endings of human relations are the lettered mile-stones. 



OCTOBER 20. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 



The vivacity of his perceptions, the audacity of his imag- 
ination, the picturesqueness of his phrase when he was 
pleased — and even more when he w^as displeased — his 
abounding good-humour, his candour, his unclouded 
frankness, his unfailing impulse to share every emotion and 
impression with his friend ; all this made comradeship a 
high felicity. 



OCTOBER 21. French Poets and Novelists, 1878. 

The personal optimism of most of us no romancer can 
confirm or dissipate, and our personal troubles, generally, 
place fiction of all kinds in an impertinent light. 



OCTOBER 22. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

It came to him in fact that just here was his usual case: 
he was forever missing things through his general genius 
for missing them, while others were forever picking them 
up through a contrary bent. And it was others who 
looked abstemious and he who looked greedy; it was he, 
somehow, who finally paid, and it was others who mainly 
partook. Yes, he should go to the scaffold yet for he 
wouldn't quite know whom. 



OCTOBER 23. The Papers, 1903. 

The talk was so low, with pauses somehow so not of em- 
barrassment that it could only have been earnest, and the 
air, an air of privilege and privacy to our young woman's 
sense, seemed charged with fine things taken for granted. 



OCTOBER 24. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

One of the things she loved him for, however, was that 
he gave you touching surprises in this line, had sudden in- 
consistencies of temper that were all to your advantage. 
He was by no means always mild when he ought to have 
been, but he was sometimes so when there was no obliga- 
tion. 



OCTOBER 25. Ivan Turgenieff. (French Poets and 

Novelists), 1878. 

Sanin's history is weighted with the moral that salvation 
lies in being able, at a given moment, to turn on one's will 
like a screw. If Mr. Turgenieff pays his tribute to the 
magic of sense he leaves us also eloquently reminded that 
soul in the long run claims her own. 



OCTOBER 26. The Reverberator, 1888. 



The old gentleman, heaven knew, had prejudices, but if 
they were numerous, and some of them very curious, they 
were not rigid. He had also such nice inconsistent feel- 
ings, such irrepressible indulgences, and they would ease 
everything off. 



OCTOBER 27. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

Surprise, it was true, was not, on the other hand, what 
the eyes of Strether's friend most showed him. They had 
taken hold of him straightway, measuring him up and 
down, as if they knew how; as if he were human material 
they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor 
was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a 
hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, sub- 
divisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, 
she pigeon-holed her fellow-mortals with a hand as free 
as that of a compositor scattering type. 



OCTOBER 28. What Maisie Knew, 1898. 

'*If you'll help me, you know, I'll help you/^ he concluded 
in the pleasant fraternizing, equalizing, not a bit patroniz- 
ing way which made the child ready to go through any- 
thing for him, and the beauty of which, as she dimly felt, 
was that it was not a deceitful descent to her years, but a 
real indifference to them. 



OCTOBER 29. The Awkward Age, iSgg. 

A suppositious spectator would certainly, on this, have 
imagined in the girl's face the delicate dawn of a sense 
that her mother had suddenly become vulgar, together 
with a general consciousness that the way to meet vulgar- 
ity was always to be frank and simple. 



OCTOBER 30. The Next Time. 

The only success worth one's powder was success in the 
line of one's idiosyncrasy. Consistency was in itself dis- 
tinction, and what was talent but the art of being com- 
pletely whatever it was that one happened to be? One's 
things were characteristic or were nothing. 



OCTOBER 31. The Portrait of a Lady, 18S1. 

She often checked herself with the thought of the thou- 
sands of people who were less happy than herself — a 
thought which for the moment made her absorbing happi- 
ness appear to her a kind of immodesty. What should we 
do with the misery of the world in a scheme of the agree- 
able for oneself? 



NOVEMBER 



I THINK the romance of a winter afternoon in 
London arises partly from the fact that when it is 
not altogether smothered the general lamp-light 
takes this hue of hospitality. Such is the colour 
of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, 
which I positively like best when the fog loiters 
upon their monumental stair-cases. . . . London 
Is Infinite. It is one of your pleasures to think of 
the experiments and excursions you may make In it, even 
when the adventures don't particularly come ofE. The 
friendly fog seems to protect and enrich them — to add 
both to the mystery and security, so that it is most In the 
winter months that the imagination weaves such delights. 
— Then the big fires blaze In the lone twilight of the clubs, 
and the new books on the tables say, "now at last you have 
time to read me," and the afternoon tea and toast appear 
to make the assurance good. It Is not a small matter 
either, to a man of letters, that this Is the best time for 
writing, and that during the lamp-lit days the white page 
he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of 
the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, 
more vivid and absorbent. The weather makes a kind 
of sedentary midnight and mufHes the possible interrup- 
tions. It's bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the 
image. 

Essays in London, iSpJ. 



NOVEMBER, i. Roderick Hudson, 187S' 

"A man should make the most of himself and be helped 
if he needs help," Rowland answered after a long pause. 
"Of course when a body begins to expand, there comes in 
the possibility of bursting; but I nevertheless approve of a 
certain tension of one's being. It's what a man is meant 
for. And then I believe in the essential salubrity of 
genius — true genius." 



NOVEMBER 2. The Bostonians, 1886. 

Miss Birdseye had given herself away so lavishly all her 
life that it was rather odd there was anything left of her 
for the supreme surrender. 



NOVEMBER 3. The Princess Casamasshna, 1886. 

Hyacinth had roamed through the great city since he was 
an urchin, but his imagination had never ceased to be 
stirred by the preparations for Sunday that went on in the 
evening among the toilers and spinners, his brothers and 
sisters, and he lost himself in all the quickened crowding 
and pushing and staring at lighted windows and chaffer- 
ing at the stalls of fishmongers and hucksters. He liked 
the people who looked as if they had got their week's 
wage and were prepared to lay it out discreetly; and even 
those whose use of it would plainly be extravagant and in- 
temperate; and best of all, those who evidently hadn't re- 
ceived it at all and who wandered about, disinterestedly, 
vaguely, with their hands in empty pockets, watching 
others make their bargains and fill their satchels, or star- 
ing at the striated sides of bacon, at the golden cubes and 
triangles of cheese, at the graceful festoons of sausage, in 
the most brilliant windows. 

NOVEMBER 4. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

His was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor 
a sturdily practical one, and he was for ever looking in 
vain for the uses of the things that please and the charm 
of the things that sustain. He was an awkward mixture of 
moral and aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made 
an ineffective reformer and an indifferent artist. It seem- 
ed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either 
in action of some immensely solid kind on behalf of an 
idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts. 



NOVEMBER 5. Broken Wings. 

One had but one's hour, and if one had it soon — it was 
really almost a case of choice — one didn't have it late. 



NOVEMBER 6. The Pupil, 1892. 

The Moreens were adventurers not merely because they 
didn't pay their debts, because they lived on society, but 
because their whole view of life, dim and confused and in- 
stinctive, like that of clever colour-blind animals, was 
speculative and rapacious and mean — they were adventur- 
ers because they were abject snobs. 



NOVEMBER 7. The Europeans, 1878. 

Never was a nature more perfectly fortunate. It was not 
a restless, apprehensive, ambitious spirit, running a race 
with the tyranny of fate, but a temper so unsuspicious as 
to put adversity ofif her guard, dodging and evading her 
with the easy, natural motion of a wind-shifted flowei. 



NOVEMBER 8. The Pupil 1892. 

They had a theory that they were very thorough, and yet 
they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, 
the intervals between the tunnels, where there were way- 
sides and views. 



NOVEMBER 9. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beau- 
tiful sight in the world. 



NOVEMBER 10. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

The beauty of the bloom had gone from the small old 
sense of safety — that was distinct. She had left it behind 
her there forever. But the beauty of the idea of a great 
adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in which she 
might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had 
been offered her instead. It was as if she had to pluck 
off her breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a 
familiar flower, a little old jewel, that was part of her 
daily dress, and to take up and shoulder as a substitute 
some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle- 
axe — conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking 
appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military 
posture. 



'NOVEMBER ii. The Lesson of the Master, 1892, 

"Look at me well and take my lesson to heart, for it is 
a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shud- 
der with your pitiful impression and that this may help 
to keep you straight in the future. Don't become in your 
old age what I am in mine — the depressing, the deplorable 
illustration of the worship of false gods!" 
"What do you mean by false gods?" Paul inquired. 
"The idols of the market — money and luxury and 'the 
world,' placing one's children and dressing one's wife — 
everything that drives one to the short and easy way. Ah, 
the vile things they make one do!" 



NOVEMBER 12. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

Only a few of Chad's guests had dined — that is fifteen or 
twenty, a few compared with the large concourse offered 
to sight by eleven o'clock ; but number and mass, quantity 
and quality, light, fragrance, sound, the overflow of hos- 
pitality meeting the high tide of response, had all, from the 
first, pressed upon Strether's consciousness, and he felt 
himself somehow part and parcel of the most festive scene, 
as the term was, in which he had ever in his life been en- 
gaged. 



NOVEMBER 13. The Letters of Robert Louis 

(Stevenson, North American Review), igoo. 

The fascination in him from the first is the mixture, and 
the extraordinary charm of his letters is that they are 
always showing this. It is the proportions, moreover, that 
are so admirable — the quantity of each different thing 
that he fitted to each other one and to the whole. The 
free life would have been all his dream, if so large a part 
of it had not been that love of letters, of expression and 
form, which is but another name for the life of service. 
Almost the last word about him, by the same law, would 
be that he had, at any rate, supremely written, were it not 
that he seems still better characterized by his having at 
any rate supremely lived. 
Robert Louis Stevenson b. 



NOVEMBER 14, . The Golden Bowl, 1904, 

"I wouldn't in any case have let her tell me what would 
have been dreadful to me — I don't zvant to know! 
There are things that are sacred — whether they're joys or 
pains. But one can always, for safety, be kind," she kept 
on; "one feels when that's right." 



NOVEMBER 15. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

"She always looks the same : like an angel who came down 
from heaven yesterday and has been rather disappointed in 
her first day on earth." 



NOVEMBER 16. The Lesson of the Master, 1892. 

"What I mean is, have 5^ou it in your mind to go in fct 
some sort of little perfection? You must have thought 
it all over, I can't believe you're without a plan. That's 
the sensation you give me, and it's so rare that it really 
stirs up one; it makes you remarkable." 



NOVEMBER i;. Merimees Letters (French Poets 

and Novelists) 1878. 

Most forms of contempt are unwise; but one of them 
seems to us peculiarly ridiculous — contempt for the age 
one lives in. Men with but a little of Merimee's in- 
genuity have been able, and have not failed, in every agt, 
to make out a deplorable case for mankind. His imagina- 
tion faded early, and it is certainly a question w^hether this 
generous spirit, half-sister at least to charity, w^ill remain 
under a roof in w^hich the ideal is treated as uncivilly as 
Me rime e treated it. 



NOVEMBER 18. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round, 
saw them through. 



NOVEMBER ig. The Wings of the Dove, igoj. 

Mrs. Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy 
conceits — secret dreams that had fluttered their hour be- 
tween its narrow walls, without, for any great part, so 
much as mustering courage to look out of its rather dim 
windows. 



NOVEMBER 20. The Fortran of a Lady, 1881. 



"Take things more easily. Don't ask so much whether 
this or that is good for you. Don't question your con- 
science so much — it will get out of tune, like a strummed 
piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don't try so much 
to form your character — it's like trying to pull open a 
rose-bud." 



NOVEMBER 21. The Papers, 1903. 

Their general irony, which they tried at the same time to 
keep gay and to make amusing at least to each other, was 
their refuge from the want of savour, the want of napkins, 
the want, too often of shillings, and of many things besides 
that they would have liked to have. 



NOVEMBER 22. The Life of George Eliot, 1885. 
(Partial Portraits), j888, 

George Eliot of course had drawbacks and difficulties, 
physical infirmities, constant liabilities to headache, dys- 
pepsia, and other illness, to deep depression, to despair 
about her work; but these jolts of the chariot were small 
in proportion to the impetus acquired, and were hardly 
greater than was necessary for reminding her of the se- 
cret of all ambitious workers in the field of art — that 
efiEort, effort, always effort, is the only key to success. 
Her great furtherance W2is that, intensely intellectual 
being as she was, the life of affection and emotion was 
also widely open to her. 
George Eliot b. 



NOVEMBER 23. The Awkward Age, 1899. 

"Will she understand? She has everything in the world 

but one," he added. "But that's half." 

"What is it?" 

"A sense of humor." 



NOVEMBER 24. Louise Pallant, i 



Never say you know the last word about any human 
heart! I was once treated to a revelation which startled 
and touched me, in the nature of a person with whom I 
had been acquainted (well, as I supposed) for years, 
whose character I had had good reasons, heaven knows, 
to appreciate and in regard to whom I flattered myself 
that I had nothing more to learn. 



NOVEMBER 25. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

"I'm a little mad, you know; you needn't be surprised if 
you hear it. That's because I stop in town when they go 
into the countr}^; all the autumn, all the winter, when 
there's no one here (save three or four millions), and the 
rain drips, drips, drips from the trees in the big dull park 
where my people live." 



NOVEMBER 26. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 



He suggested above all, however, that wondrous state of. 
3^outh in which the elements, the metals more or less 
precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the ques- 
tion of the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, 
must wait for comparative coolness. 



NOVEMBER 27. Frances Anne Kemble. (Essays in 

London), 1893. 

I remember that at the play she often said, "Yes, they're 
funny; but they don't begin to know how funny they 
might be!" Mrs. Kemble always knew, and her good- 
humor effectually forearmed her. She had more "habits" 
than most people have room in life for, and a theory that 
to a person of her disposition they were as necessary as 
the close meshes of a strait-waistcoat. If she had not lived 
by rule (on her showing), she would have lived infallibly 
by riot. Her rules and her riots, her reservations and her 
concessions, all her luxuriant theory and all her extrava- 
gant practice, her drollery that mocked at her melancholy, 
her imagination that mocked at her drollery, and her rare 
forms and personal traditions that mocked a little at 
everything — these were part of the constant freshness 
which made those who loved her love her so much. 
Fanny Kemble b. 



NOVEMBER 28. The Portrait of a Lady, 1881. 

"We know too much about people in these days; we hear 
too much. Our ears, our minds, our mouths, are stuffed 
with personalities. Don't mind anything that anyone tells 
you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for 
yourself." 



NOVEMBER 29. The Next Time, 1895. 

The happiness that sat with us when we talked and that 
made it always amusing to talk, the sense of his being on 
the heels of success, coming closer and closer, touching it 
at last, knowing that he should touch it again and hold it 
fast and hold it high. 



NOVEMBER 30. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

"The very essence of her, as you surely by this time have 
made out for yourself, is that, when she adopts a view, she 
— well to her own sense, really brings the thing about, 
fairly terrorizes with her view any other, an opposite 
view, and those with it who represent it." 



DECEMBER 



T 



HERE was a splendid sky, all blue-black and 
silver — a sparkling wintry vault where the 
stars were like a myriad points of ice. The 
air was silent and sharp, and the vague 
snow looked cruel. 

The Bostonians, 1886. 



The early dusk had gathered thick, but the evening was 
fine and the lighted streets had the animation and variety 
of a winter that had begun with brilliancy. The shop- 
fronts glowed through frosty panes, the bells of the street- 
cars jangled in the cold air, the newsboys hawked the 
evening-paper, the vestibules of the theatres, illuminated 
and flanked with colored posters and the photographs of 
actresses, exhibited seductively their swinging doors of 
red leather or baize, spotted with little brass nails. Behind 
great plates of glass the interior of the hotels became vis- 
ible, with marble-paved lobbies, white with electric lamps, 
and columns, and Westerners on divans stretching their 
legs, while behind a counter, set apart and covered with an 
array of periodicals and novels in paper covers, little boys, 
with the faces of old men, showing plans of the play houses 
and offering librettos, sold orchestra chairs at a premium. 

The Bostonians, 1886. 



DECEMBER i. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

He felt the fiction of existence more than was suspected ; 
but he asked no allowance on grounds of temper, he 
assumed that fate had treated him inordinately well and 
that he had no excuse for taking an ill-natured view of 
life, and he undertook to believe that all women were 
fair, all men were brave, and the world was a delightful 
place of sojourn, until the contrary should be distinctly 
proved. 



DECEMBER 2. The Golden Bowl 1904. 

Variety of imagination — what is that but fatal, in the 
world of affairs, unless so disciplined as not to be distin- 
guished from monotony? 



DECEMBER 3. The Letters of Robert Louis 

Stevenson (North American Review) igoo. 

Stevenson never covered his tracks, and the tracks prove 
perhaps to be what most attaches us. We follow them 
here from year to year and from stage to stage, with the 
same charmed sense with which he has made us follow 
one of his hunted herds in the heather. Life and fate and 
an early catastrophe were ever at his heels, and when he 
at last falls fighting, sinks dow^n in the very act of valor, 
the "happy ending," as he calls it for some of his corres- 
pondents, is, though precipitated and not conventional, 
assuredly there. 



DECEMBER 4. The Letters of Robert Louis 

Stevenson (North American Review) igoo. 

It took his own delightful talk to show how more than 
absurd it might be, and, if convenient, how very obscurely 
so, that such ?n incurable rover should have been compli- 
cated both with such an incurable scribbler and sad and 
incurable invalid, and that a man should find himself such 
an anomaly as a drenched yachtsman haunted with "style," 
a shameless Bohemian haunted with duty, and a victim at 
once of the personal hunger and instinct for adventure 
and of the critical, constructive, sedentary view of it. 
He had everj^thing all round — adventure most of all; to 
feel which we have only to turn from the beautiful flush 
of it in his text to the scarce less beautiful vision of the 
great hilltop in Pacific seas to which, after death, he was 
borne by islanders and chiefs. 



DECEMBER 5. Washington Square, 1881. 



"You women are all the same! But the type to which 
your brother belongs was made to be the ruin of you, and 
j^ou were made to be its handmaids and victims. The 
sign of the type in question is the determination — some- 
times terrible in its quiet intensity — to accept nothing of 
life but its pleasures, and secure the pleasures chiefly by 
the aid of your complaisant sex. Young men of this class 
never do anything for themselves that they can get other 
people to do for them, and it Is the infatuation, the devo- 
tion, the superstition of others, that keeps them going. 
These others in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred are 
women. What our young friends chiefly insist upon is 
that someone else shall suffer for them; and women do 
that sort of thing, as you must know, wonderfully well." 



DECEMBER 6. The Awkward Age, 1899- 



It was a mark of the special intercourse of these good 
friends that though they had for each other, in manner 
and tone, such a fund of consideration as might almost 
have given it the stamp of diplomacy, there was yet in it 
also something of that economy of expression which is the 
result of a common experience. 



DECEMBER 7. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 



She was a success, that was what it came to and that 
was what it was to be a success : it always happened before 
one could know it. One's ignorance was in fact often the 
greatest part of it. 



DECEMBER 8, The Great Condition, 1900. 

There it practically was, this experience, in the character 
of her delicacy, in her kindly, witty, sensitive face, worn 
fine, too fine perhaps, but only to its increase of expres- 
sion. She was neither a young fool nor an old one, as- 
suredly; but if the intenser acquaintance with life had 
made the object of one's affection neither false nor hard, 
how could one, on the whole, since the story might be so 
interesting, wish it away?" 



DECEMBER g. The Princess Casamassima, 1886. 

Hyacinth found it less amusing, but the theatre, in any 
conditions, was full of sweet deception for him. His 
imagination projected itself lovingly across the footlights, 
gilded and coloured the shabby canvas and battered ac- 
cessories, and lost itself so effectually in the future world 
that the end of the piece, however long, or however short, 
brought with it a kind of alarm, like a stoppage of his 
personal life. It was impossible to be more friendly to 
the dramatic illusion. 



DECEMBER 10. Roderick Hudson, 1875. 

His duty was obscure, but he never lost a certain private 
satisfaction in remembering that on two or three occasions 
it had been performed with something of an ideal pre- 
cision. 



DECEMBER ii. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

It had ever been her sign that she was, for all occasions, 
found ready, without loose ends or exposed accessories or 
unremoved superfluities; a suggestion of the swept and 
garnished, in her whole splendid, yet thereby more or less 
encumbered and embroidered setting, that reflected her 
small still passion for order and symmetry, for objects 
with their backs to the walls, and spoke even of some 
probable reference, in her American blood, to dusting and 
polishing New England grandmothers. 



DECEMBER 12. The Lesson of the Master, 1892, 

The quiet face had a charm which increased in propor- 
tion as it became completely quiet. The change to the 
expression of gaiety excited on Overt's part a private pro- 
test which resembled that of a person sitting in the twi- 
light and enjoying it, wher; the lamp is brought in too 
soon. 



DECEMBER 13. A Landscape Painter, 1866. 

"To be young, strong and poor — such in this blessed nine- 
teenth century, is the great basis of solid success." 



DECEMBER 14. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

The tokens of a chastened ease, after all, still abounded, 
many marks of a taste whose discriminations might per- 
haps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense 
little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep sus- 
picion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. 
The general result of this was something for w^hich he 
had no name, on the spot, quite ready, but something he 
would have come nearest to naming in speaking of it as 
the air of supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, 
still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of 
private honor. 



DECEMBER 15, tVashington Square, 1881. 

He had passed his life in estimating people (it was part 
of the medical trade), and in nineteen cases out of twenty 
he was right. 



DECEMBER 16, The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

So ordered and so splendid a rest, all the tokens, spread- 
ing about them, of confidence solidly supported, might 
have suggested for persons of poorer pitch the very in- 
solence of facility. Still, they weren't insolent — they 
weren't — they were only blissful and grateful and per- 
sonally modest, not ashamed of knowing, with competence, 
when great things were great, when good things were 
good, and when safe things were safe, and not, therefore, 
placed below their fortune by timidity; which would 
have been as bad as being below it by impudence. 



DECEMBER 17. The Awkward Age, 1B99. 



"For how can, how need a woman be 'pi'oud' who's so \ 
preternaturally clever? Pride's only for use when wit 
breaks down — it's the train the cyclist takes when his 
tire's deflated." 



DECEMBER 18. The Ambassadors, 1903- 



He was struck with the tack, the taste of her vagueness, 
which simply took for granted in him a sense of beautiful 
things. He was conscious of how much it was affected, 
this sense, by something subdued and discreet in the way 
she had arranged herself for her special object and her 
morning walk — he believed her to have come on foot; 
the way her slightly thicker veil was drawn — a mere 
touch, but everything; the composed gravity of her dress, 
in -which here and there, a dull wine-color seemed to gleam 
faintly through black; the charming discretion of her 
small, compact head; the quiet note, as she sat, of her 
folded, gray-gloved hands. 



DECEMBER ig. Roderick Hudson, 1875-9. 



"Upon my word rm not happy! I'm clever enough to 
want more than I have got. I'm tired of myself, my 
own thoughts, my own affairs, my own eternal company. 
True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of 
one's self, but the point is not only to get out — you must 
stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing 
errand." 



DECEMBER 20. The Ambassadors, 1903. 

'*Is Mamie a great partif" 

"Oh, the greatest we have — our prettiest, brightest girl." 

"I know what they can be. And with money?" 

"Not perhaps a great deal of that — but with so much of 

everything else that we don't miss it. We dont miss 

money much, you know," Strether added, "in general, in 

America, in pretty girls." 



DECEMBER 21. The Next Time, 1895. 

I would cross the scent with something showily impossible, 
splendidly unpopular. 



DECEMBER 22, The Ambassadors, 1903. 



Above all she suggested to him the reflection that the 
femme du monde — in these finest developments of the type 
— was, like Cleopatra in the play, indeed various and mul- 
tifold. She had aspects, characters, days, nights — or had 
them at least, showed them by a mysterious law of her 
own, when in addition to everything she happened also 
to be a woman of genius. She was an obscure person, a 
muffled person one day ; and a showy person, an uncovered 
person, the next. 



DECEMBER 23. The Golden Bowl, 1904. 

Such connection as he enjoyed with the ironic question 
in general resided substantially less in a personal use of it 
than in the habit of seeing it as easy to others. He was 
so framed by nature as to be able to keep his inconveni- 
ences separate from his resentments. 



DECEMBER 24. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas, this 
year was, as, in London, in so many other years, discon- 
certingly mild; the still air was soft, the thick light was 
grey, the great town looked empty, and in the Park, where 
the grass was green, where the sheep browsed, where the 
birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks lent 
themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. 



DECEMBER 25. The Altar of the Dead, 1895, 

No shrine could be more decked and no ceremonial more 
stately than those to which his worship was attached. He 
had no imagination about these things save that they were 
accessible to every one who should ever feel the need of 
them. The poorest could build such temples of the spirit 
— could make them blaze with candles and smoke with 
incense, make them flush with pictures and flowers. The 
cost, in common phrase, of keeping them up fell entirely 
on the liberal heart. 



DECEMBER 26, What Maisie Knew, i8g8. 

She was at the age when all stories are true a;nd all con- 
ceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute; the 
present alone was vivid. 



DECEMBER 27. The Wings of the Dove, 1903. 

It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder's that her face in speech 
was like a lighted window at night, but that silence im- 
mediately drew the curtain. 



DECEMBER 28. The Papers, 1903, 

They were above all in that phase of youth and in that 
state of aspiration in which "luck" is the subject of most 
frequent recurrence, as definite as the colour red, and in 
which it is the elegant name for money when people are 
•is refined as they are poor. 



DECEMBER 29. The Ambassadors, igos- 



A fine, worn, handsome face, a face that was like an 
open letter in a foreign tongue. 



DECEMBER 30. The Ambassadors, 1903, 

The little waxed salle a manger was sallow and sociable; 
Francois dancing over it, all smiles, was a man and a 
brother; the high-shoirldered patronne, with her high-held, 
much-rubbed hands, seemed always assenting exuberantly 
to something unsaid ; the Paris evening, in short, was, for 
Strether in the very taste of the soup, in the goodness, as 
he was innocently pleased to think it, of the wine, in the 
pleasant coarse texture of the napkin and the crunch of the 
thick-crusted bread. 



DECEMBER 31. Browning in Westminster Abbey, 
1890. (Essays in London), 1893. 

Just as his great sign to those who knew him was that he 
was a force of health, of temperament, of tone, so what 
he takes into the Abbey is an immense expression of life — 
of life rendered with large liberty and free experiment, 
with an unprejudiced intellectual eagerness to put himself 
in other people's place, to participate in complications and 
consequences — a restlessness of psychological research that 
might well alarm any pale company for their formal 
orthodoxies. 
Robert Browning buried in Westminster Abbey 1890. 



SE>- 21 IS^H 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



StF 28 >^M 



